Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7790, which features GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7790 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be a lot (about 424%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45312 (424%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be a lot (more or less 50%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a 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 sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.