Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB, which features clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 160 SPUs as well as 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		31 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (142%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 24192 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB is much (approximately 78%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		6000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4688 (78%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB		3000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7688 (256%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.