GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a frequency of 828 MHz on this particular model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GT 440 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 62784 (145%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a lot (about 50%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 440 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7120 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is superior to the GeForce GT 440 3GB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7120 (50%)

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 transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.