GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		144000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 38016 (36%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 should be a lot (about 92%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		40992 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19616 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7904 (37%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.