GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which has core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 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)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB should in theory be just a bit superior to the GeForce GT 1030 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 3840 (8%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 1030 will be much (more or less 279%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29792 (279%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 1030 will be much (more or less 89%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9552 (89%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.