Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5670, which features a clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 400(80x5) SPUs, 20 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5670, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5670 will be quite a bit (approximately 45%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4812 (45%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB will be quite a bit (about 72%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5670, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4488 (72%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.