GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB should in theory be a little bit better than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB is a lot (more or less 192%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20512 (192%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 256MB will be a small bit (approximately 3%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 288 (3%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.