Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4850 1GB is 20% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 1GB is a lot (more or less 134%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.