GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which comes with core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 48384 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is just a bit (about 3%) better at AF than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 576 (3%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be quite a bit (more or less 106%) better at AA than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, and capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10976 (106%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.