GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which has a GPU core clock speed of 668 MHz, and 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTS 150 is 21% faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 5504 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 will be a lot (approximately 343%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36672 (343%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 150 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1152 (11%)

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 past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.