Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 160 SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		31 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (142%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 1GB should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 40192 (314%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 1GB is much (more or less 114%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		5000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5688 (114%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)		2500 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8188 (328%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 potential to get to the max fill rate.