Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which has clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4830 1GB should in theory be a little bit better than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4830 1GB should be a lot (approximately 72%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7712 (72%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1488 (16%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.