GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 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 3850 256MB		75 Watts
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4736 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB is quite a bit (approximately 134%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14368 (134%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.