Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which features core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4850 2GB should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 10560 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB should be much (more or less 134%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14312 (134%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 688 (7%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.