GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. 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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8600 GTS should perform quite a bit faster than 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 should be a little bit (more or less 1%) better at texture 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 will be a lot (about 98%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of 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.