GeForce GTX 970 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 speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 828 MHz on this particular model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 970 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 118016 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be a lot (more or less 411%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87824 (411%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45824 (214%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.