Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5670, which features clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 400(80x5) SPUs as well as 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 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5670 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5670 will be much (about 45%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4812 (45%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB should be much (about 72%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5670, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.