Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which has GPU clock speed of 575 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

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

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

Texel Rate

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

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

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.