Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16128 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (approximately 41%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (41%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.