Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 52 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 75008 (142%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (about 248%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26512 (248%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (about 132%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14112 (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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.