GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 668 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (80%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) should theoretically be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 9088 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) should be quite a bit (about 289%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30912 (289%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output 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.