Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which features clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB should theoretically be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 10560 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB should be a lot (more or less 134%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14312 (134%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 688 (7%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.