GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a frequency of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 8600 GTS should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 5504 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GTS is just a bit (more or less 1%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 112 (1%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 should be much (more or less 98%) better at AA than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5288 (98%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.