GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be 84% quicker than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 48256 (84%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB is just a bit (about 17%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8848 (71%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.