Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 150016 (142%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 985%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 210624 (985%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 71424 (334%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's 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 better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.