Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 780 is 172% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		288384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 182400 (172%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 is quite a bit (approximately 675%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		165696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 144320 (675%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 will be much (more or less 94%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		41424 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20048 (94%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.