GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 828 MHz on this card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2, in theory, should be a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (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 much (approximately 83%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering 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

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be much (more or less 46%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.