GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has GPU core speed of 668 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a little bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 2304 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra should be a lot (more or less 83%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17792 (83%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6688 (46%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.