GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which has core clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. 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

The GeForce GTX 480 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 71424 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be a lot (more or less 96%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20624 (96%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is quite a bit (more or less 57%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12224 (57%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. 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 bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.