GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

The GeForce GTX 950 makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 1024 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1652 MHz on this particular model. It features 768 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which comes with a clock frequency of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.