Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 211008 (398%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 1008%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107712 (1008%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (more or less 177%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18912 (177%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.