Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which features GPU clock speed of 575 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 48384 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a small bit (approximately 16%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2976 (16%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is much (approximately 132%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12176 (132%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in 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. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics 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 amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.