GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set 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 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		150 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 82304 (311%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) will be a lot (about 241%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25712 (241%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is superior to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10112 (95%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.