GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 48384 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a small bit (about 3%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 576 (3%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be quite a bit (approximately 106%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10976 (106%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.