GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which features core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 450 should in theory be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4736 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 should be much (about 134%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14368 (134%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be a bit (approximately 17%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1840 (17%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 number of pixels the video card could 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 Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.