GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which comes with GPU core speed of 668 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is 3% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 2816 (3%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be a lot (about 70%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15024 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 576 (3%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.