Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB should be 100% quicker than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 26496 (100%)

Texel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same texel fill rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at anisotropic filtering. (explain)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel rate, so theoretically they should be equally good at at anti-aliasing, and be capable of handling the same resolutions. (explain)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.