GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 460 1GB is 9% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 9216 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 1GB is much (about 77%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16424 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 224 (1%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 in one second.

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