Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB, which features GPU clock speed of 650 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 480 Stream Processors, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		50 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 256MB should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 24192 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB should be much (about 46%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		15600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4912 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 256MB is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 1GB		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5488 (106%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.