GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which features a clock frequency of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 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 256MB		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 460		150 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 33408 (63%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 is quite a bit (about 254%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27112 (254%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 is much (more or less 52%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5512 (52%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.