If you are looking at specifications for your computer’s gaming hardware, then you have probably come across the ATI Radeon HD 3850, also known as AMD’s RV670PRO. This graphics card is probably one of the least expensive of all the new line of graphics card of its capacity; but its specifications and capabilities are the same or almost the same as with the other gaming cards like the HD 3870.
It should serve all your gaming needs if you are willing to pay for $179 a pop. If you think that this is a bit too steep, you should consider the fact that the other cards cost more than $200 a piece. The ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics card is one of the first two GPU (Global Processing Unit) to be manufactured on 55nm processes from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited or (TSMC.) This helps lower the cost considerably, making it more affordable for mass release.
There are other more expensive graphics cards with larger capacities, larger memories, higher core clock speed and higher memory clock speed, but if you are on a budget, this will serve aptly. You do have to remember that you need to configure this to your account to make it really worth your while.
This graphics card also has solid home theater capabilities and can support multiple card configurations of up to four cards in one computer unit. For this reasonable price, you will be able to play some of the most current 3D games out there with detailed settings and reasonable resolutions. However, compared to its higher end cousins, the ATI Radeon HD 3850 cannot afford you a smooth frame rate in DirectX 10 or 10.1. This means that your gaming experience can be limited, but there aren’t that much great games anyway that utilizes DirectX 10 or DirectX 10.1 – at least not so far as the list of games from 2007. Nevertheless, you can have consolation on the fact that the Radeon HD 3850 will work well enough with Direct X9 settings.
It is true that the Radeon HD 3850 has a small memory as compared to the new line of graphics card emerging in 2008, but this one still that utilizes a serviceable internal 512-bit ring bus and an external 256-bit memory bus. Unlike other graphics card, it does have the advantage of being able to support the UVD (Universal Video Decoding) Engine that allows full hardware acceleration of such programs for Blue-Ray, HDCP, HDMI and HD-DVD. The UVD Engine is responsible for high definition display and video presentation, and some graphics card cannot process this.
On a more technical note, the Radeon HD 3850 is a single slot card that carries the same number of ROPs, stream processors and texture units as its dual slot counterpart: the HD 3870 (RV670XT).
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