Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 160 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		31 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (142%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 24192 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB will be quite a bit (more or less 78%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		6000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4688 (78%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB will be much (about 256%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		3000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7688 (256%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.