Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4770, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 800 MHz on this specific card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is 4% quicker than the Radeon HD 4770 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 1792 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4770 will be much (approximately 125%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13312 (125%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4770 will be a bit (more or less 12%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1312 (12%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.