GeForce 8800 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has core clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be much better than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		44800 MB/sec
	Difference: 61184 (137%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GT 256MB will be much (approximately 57%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12224 (57%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11776 (123%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved 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 memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.