GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 256MB will be 23% quicker than the GeForce GT 440 3GB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 9792 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 440 3GB should be a lot (more or less 33%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3568 (33%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 440 3GB is much (about 33%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3568 (33%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.