GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 828 MHz on this particular model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 980 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 118016 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be a lot (more or less 574%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122752 (574%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be much (about 237%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 50688 (237%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.