Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

The Radeon HD 3850 256MB uses a 55 nm design. ATi has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 828 MHz on this card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5670, which comes with core speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 400(80x5) SPUs as well as 20 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 3850 256MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5670 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 3850 256MB	Radeon HD 5670
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	Nov 19, 2007	January 14, 2010
Code Name	RV670 PRO	Redwood XT
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16/AGP 8x	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	256 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	668 MHz	775 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	828 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	320(64x5)	400(80x5)
Texture Mapping Units	16	20
Render Output Units	16	8
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	75 watts	61 watts
Shader Model	4.1	5.0
Bandwidth	52992 MB/sec	64000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	10688 Mtexels/sec	15500 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10688 Mpixels/sec	6200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.