GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 2816 (3%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is a lot (approximately 70%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15024 (70%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a bit (about 3%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 576 (3%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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 maximum fill rate.