Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 70016 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (approximately 295%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63104 (295%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6784 (32%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.