Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which has GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (133%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 100608 (190%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be quite a bit (approximately 649%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69312 (649%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21312 (199%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the 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 card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.