Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 4750

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4750, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 730 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 800 MHz on this specific card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4750 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4750		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 1792 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4750 is a lot (about 119%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4750		23360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12672 (119%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4750 should be a bit (about 9%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 4750		11680 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 992 (9%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.