GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features a clock frequency of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GTX 650 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25984 (32%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 650 is quite a bit (approximately 58%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12480 (58%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is superior to the GeForce GTX 650, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4448 (26%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 maximum fill rate.