GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features a GPU core clock speed of 668 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be 8% quicker than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 7488 (8%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should be much (more or less 35%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7424 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a little bit (about 1%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.