Things have changed for the better when it comes to finding a video card that will allow you play the majority of the current video games without spending a weeks paycheck. A prime example of the cards we are speaking about is the Sapphire HD3850, this card supports DirectX 10.1 which will give you a leg up on playing the newest video games to come down the pike. The 3850 also supports Shader 4.1 as well as Hardware processed 1080p video playback of Blu-ray™ and HD DVDs. The two cards we will be testing today are not the typical 512MB cards, we were lucky enough to get our hands on a pair of 1GB HD3850 cards thanks to the help of our friends at Sapphire Technology. This card is in direct competition with the NVIDIA 8800GT, but the 3850 will save you about $50.00 if you purchase the 512MB card.
Specifications
666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
320 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Search
