Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which has clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 300 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 267008 (504%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a lot (more or less 1391%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 148672 (1391%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42432 (397%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.