GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which has GPU core speed of 668 MHz, and 256 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 828 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTS 450 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 31232 (118%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be much (about 134%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14368 (134%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 should be a small bit (about 17%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out 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 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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