Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which comes with core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 160 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (142%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 256MB should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 40192 (314%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 256MB should be quite a bit (approximately 114%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5688 (114%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 256MB should be a lot (approximately 328%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8188 (328%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.