GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which has core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 460 SE should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 55808 (105%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 SE is much (approximately 192%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20512 (192%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 SE will be a lot (more or less 95%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10112 (95%)

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 transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.