Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon HD 4350

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4350, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 575 MHz. The DDR2 RAM works at a speed of 500 MHz on this particular card. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4350		22 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 84 Watts (382%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4350 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4350		8000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (800%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB will be much (more or less 170%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4350. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		4600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7800 (170%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB is quite a bit (approximately 439%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4350, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		2300 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10100 (439%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill 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 get to the maximum fill rate.