GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 828 MHz on this model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is 84% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 48256 (84%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB will be a little bit (approximately 17%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8848 (71%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.