Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 6750 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6750 1GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 720 SPUs as well as 36 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6750 1GB		86 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6750 1GB should be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750 1GB		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6750 1GB will be much (about 144%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750 1GB		26100 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15412 (144%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6750 1GB is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6750 1GB		11600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 912 (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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics chip 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 number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.