Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 is 66% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (more or less 295%) faster with regards to 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

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (more or less 32%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. 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 better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.