Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6850 is 142% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (approximately 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

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, and very much so. (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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.