GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 features a GPU core speed of 540 MHz, and the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM is set to run at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 32 Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

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

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.