Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which has GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 149504 (564%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (about 690%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73792 (690%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (about 163%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.