GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 22272 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti is a lot (about 146%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31232 (146%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti will be a lot (approximately 23%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4928 (23%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.