Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 4750

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4750, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 730 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 800 MHz on this card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB will be 4% faster than the Radeon HD 4750 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4750		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 1792 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4750 will be quite a bit (approximately 119%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4750		23360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12672 (119%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4750 will be a bit (about 9%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 4750		11680 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 992 (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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.