Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5570, which comes with core speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 400(80x5) SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 32 Watts (74%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5570 will be 9% quicker than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 2304 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 should be quite a bit (approximately 22%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2312 (22%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.