GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTS 450 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 128 (0%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 is much (more or less 102%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12656 (102%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 128 (1%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.