GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs 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 along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 650		64 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 650 should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 27008 (51%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 650 will be quite a bit (more or less 217%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23168 (217%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 650 is quite a bit (more or less 58%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, and capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6240 (58%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a 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 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record 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 card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many 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.