GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 828 MHz on this card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti should perform much 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 will be much (about 146%) faster with regards to 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 will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.