GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 828 MHz on this particular 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 660 will be 172% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 91200 (172%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be quite a bit (approximately 634%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67712 (634%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12832 (120%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.