Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7790 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 is a lot (about 424%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45312 (424%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7790 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5312 (50%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.