Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4770, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 800 MHz on this card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 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 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 1GB should in theory be a small bit better than the Radeon HD 4770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 1792 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4770 will be much (more or less 125%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13312 (125%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4770 is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.