GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 828 MHz on this particular model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 7488 (8%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be quite a bit (about 35%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7424 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.