GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which has core clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		150 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 91008 (172%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti will be a lot (more or less 859%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91792 (859%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti should be a lot (approximately 105%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11272 (105%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high 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 amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.