Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which has a core clock speed of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 828 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 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 1GB		75 Watts
Geforce GTX 780		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 780 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		288384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 235392 (444%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 will be quite a bit (approximately 1450%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		165696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 155008 (1450%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 780 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		41424 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 30736 (288%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 output rate is also dependant 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.