In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 3870 are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition.

The Radeon HD 3870 has a 77 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GT 730. This results in the Radeon HD 3870 providing 1.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 3870 has a 77 MHz higher core clock speed and 12 more Render Output Units than the GT 730. This results in the Radeon HD 3870 providing 9.6 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 730 was released over three years more recently than the Radeon HD 3870, and so the GT 730 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Radeon HD 3870 when running the latest games.

The GT 730 has 1536 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 3870, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the Radeon HD 3870 has superior memory performance.

The Radeon HD 3870 has 43.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 730, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 3870 is noticeably better than the GT 730.

The GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition has 96 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 3870 has 320. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 730 is 134 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 3870 is 249. The Radeon HD 3870 having 115 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 3870 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GT 730.

The GT 730 transistor size technology is 15 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon HD 3870. This means that the GT 730 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon HD 3870.

The GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition requires 49 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 3870 requires 106 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GT 730 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the Radeon HD 3870. The Radeon HD 3870 requires 57 Watts more than the GT 730 to run. The difference is significant enough that the Radeon HD 3870 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GT 730.