Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which comes with core clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4830 512MB should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4830 512MB will be much (more or less 72%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7712 (72%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is superior to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1488 (16%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.