Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6770, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 38784 (58%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 should be much (more or less 68%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14624 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6976 (48%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.