Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 6750

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6750, which has a core clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 720 SPUs, 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 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6750		86 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6750 should be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6750 is quite a bit (more or less 144%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750		26100 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15412 (144%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6750 will be a little bit (more or less 9%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750		11600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate also depends on many 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.