GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 828 MHz on this card. 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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 275 will be 20% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 21024 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 275 should be quite a bit (approximately 137%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29264 (137%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is much (about 21%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 275, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3652 (21%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.