GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 460 1GB should be 9% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 9216 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 1GB is much (about 77%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16424 (77%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 1GB should be a bit (more or less 1%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 224 (1%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of 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 ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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 maximum fill rate.