Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6770, which features clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
	Difference: 33 Watts (44%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6770 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 14208 (27%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 is a lot (approximately 237%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25312 (237%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6770 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3712 (35%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.