GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 295 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 117792 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be much (approximately 331%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70784 (331%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is much (about 51%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10880 (51%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.