Geforce GTX 760 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which comes with core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 760 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 760		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 86272 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 760 should be a lot (more or less 340%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Geforce GTX 760		94080 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72704 (340%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 760 will be a lot (more or less 47%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Geforce GTX 760		31360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9984 (47%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.