Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has GPU clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 127104 (480%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be a lot (more or less 415%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44352 (415%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be quite a bit (more or less 157%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16832 (157%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen 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 the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling 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 could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.