GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti should be 272% quicker than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 72000 (272%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be much (approximately 169%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18112 (169%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be quite a bit (more or less 102%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10912 (102%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.