Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has GPU clock speed of 625 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR4 RAM running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 10560 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB is quite a bit (about 134%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14312 (134%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 1GB should be just a bit (about 7%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 688 (7%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends 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 max fill rate.