GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 828 MHz on this particular model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce GTS 450 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 48256 (84%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be a small bit (about 17%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8848 (71%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.