GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		47 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 should theoretically perform a little bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 4096 (18%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 should be quite a bit (about 24%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2048 (24%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6368 (147%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.