GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which has core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		106 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 450 (OEM) will be a lot (about 77%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8272 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8272 (77%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus 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 ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied 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 better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.