Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5670, which comes with a core clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 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 256MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5670 will be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5670 will be quite a bit (approximately 45%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4812 (45%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 256MB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.