GeForce 8800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which has a core clock frequency of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 828 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB should perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GT 1GB will be a lot (more or less 214%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22912 (214%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is superior to the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1088 (11%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.