GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which has a core clock speed of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 828 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It 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 3690/3830		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 480 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 150912 (570%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be much (approximately 293%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31312 (293%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is quite a bit (about 214%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22912 (214%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write 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 speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.