Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (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 a lot (approximately 295%) more effective 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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.