GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 825 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM set to run at 1126 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should theoretically be a little bit superior to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
	Difference: 15872 (12%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti should be a lot (approximately 99%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26208 (99%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is a little bit (approximately 0%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 96 (0%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.