Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with GPU core speed of 700 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4730 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4730 will be a lot (about 110%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11712 (110%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5088 (91%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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