GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which comes with core clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 340 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 51584 (95%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be much (approximately 21%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (21%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is quite a bit (about 386%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 340, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16976 (386%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.