GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 460		150 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 460 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 33408 (63%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 will be much (about 254%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27112 (254%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 should be a lot (approximately 52%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5512 (52%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.