Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 680 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 86272 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 should be a lot (about 502%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107392 (502%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be quite a bit (more or less 51%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10816 (51%)

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 in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 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 graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.