Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Geforce GTX 780		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Geforce GTX 780 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		288384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 235392 (444%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 should be a lot (approximately 1450%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		165696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 155008 (1450%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 is a lot (about 288%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		41424 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.