GeForce GTX 780 Ti vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 780 Ti		336000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 230016 (217%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti will be much (approximately 882%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 780 Ti		210000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 188624 (882%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti is quite a bit (more or less 96%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 780 Ti		42000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20624 (96%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.