Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5850 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be much (about 321%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39800 (321%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be quite a bit (approximately 87%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (87%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.