GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with GPU core speed of 668 MHz, and 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 828 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 32 Watts (74%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3690/3830 will be 5% quicker than the GeForce GT 320 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 1216 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 will be quite a bit (approximately 21%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2272 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.