GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which features clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 460 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 33408 (63%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 will be a lot (more or less 254%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27112 (254%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.