GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

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

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 42624 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB will be a bit (about 15%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3248 (15%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be much (more or less 108%) better at AA than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11116 (108%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.