Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4730, which has core clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4730 should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4730 is much (more or less 110%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11712 (110%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 256MB is superior to the Radeon HD 4730, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5088 (91%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.