Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6750

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6750, which features a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 720 Stream Processors, 36 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6750		86 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6750 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6750 will be quite a bit (more or less 144%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750		26100 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15412 (144%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6750 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750		11600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 912 (9%)

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 across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.