GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is 116% quicker than the GeForce GT 1030 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 56832 (116%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 1030 will be much (more or less 89%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19104 (89%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1136 (6%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.