Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 52 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 101504 (383%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (about 248%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26512 (248%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant 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 max fill rate.