Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which has GPU clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 960 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 22016 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit (about 74%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15824 (74%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3424 (16%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it 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 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.