Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (167%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 107008 (202%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (more or less 559%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59712 (559%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14912 (140%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.