Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4730, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is 84% faster than the Radeon HD 4730 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 48384 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4730 is a small bit (about 5%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1024 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be quite a bit (more or less 282%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4730, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15776 (282%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.