Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 690 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 278528 (263%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 will be much (more or less 996%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 212864 (996%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be a lot (about 174%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37184 (174%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.