Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 575 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4830 512MB should be 9% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4830 512MB is much (more or less 72%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7712 (72%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1488 (16%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one 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 worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.