Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon HD 4750

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4750, which comes with core clock speeds of 730 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 256MB should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4750 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4750		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 1792 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4750 is quite a bit (approximately 119%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4750		23360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12672 (119%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4750 is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 4750		11680 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.