Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5670, which has clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 400(80x5) SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5670 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5670 is quite a bit (more or less 45%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4812 (45%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 5670, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus 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 ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.