Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which features clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 123008 (232%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (more or less 690%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73792 (690%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (approximately 163%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17472 (163%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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 bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.