Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

The Radeon HD 3850 1GB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a frequency of 828 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6670 (OEM) 1GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 480 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.