Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with GPU clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 237504 (896%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (about 1008%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107712 (1008%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		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 transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.