Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5670, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 400(80x5) SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5670 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41984 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be quite a bit (approximately 38%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5876 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15176 (245%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface 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 better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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