Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 575 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		95 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4830 1GB, in theory, should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4830 1GB is much (about 72%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7712 (72%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 256MB is superior to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.