Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 680 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be quite a bit (approximately 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 is quite a bit (more or less 51%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.