GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has a GPU core clock speed of 668 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 295 is 111% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 117792 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 should be a lot (about 331%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70784 (331%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 should be quite a bit (approximately 51%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10880 (51%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.