GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which comes with clock 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

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 560 is 21% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 22144 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 is quite a bit (approximately 112%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23984 (112%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4544 (21%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.