GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific model. 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 450, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4736 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 is a lot (more or less 134%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14368 (134%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be a bit (about 17%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1840 (17%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must 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 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 by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.