MSI RADEON HD 3850 OC REVIEW

"MSI Radeon HD 3850 OC featuring the HIS Radeon HD 3870. The MSI Radeon HD 3850 OC has a 12% lower clock speed, 27% lower memory speed and same 320 pixel shaders compared to the HIS Radeon HD 3870. Another difference between the MSI Radeon HD 3850 OC and His Radeon HD 3870 is the memory. The MSI Radeon HD 3850 OC uses 512MB Gddr3 memory while the His Radeon HD 3870 uses 512mb Gddr4 memory. It is going to be interesting fight but MSI Radeon HD 3850 OC doesn't stand a chance against the more expensive His Radeon HD 3870 but if the MSI Radeon HD 3850 OC can stay close to the His Radeon HD 3870 then that is a great performance!"

Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support

"2x/4x/8x modes. Sparse multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sample patterns, and centroid sampling. Temporal anti-aliasing. Adaptive anti-aliasing mode. 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. Command processor for reduced CPU overhead. Shader instruction and constant caches. Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle. Up to 128 textures per pixel. Fully associative multi-level texture cache design. DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression. High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192). Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs. Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer. Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear. Lossless Z and stencil compression (up to 128:1). Lossless color compression (up to 8:1). 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support. Physics processing support."

Bus Memory Controller

"Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes."

High performance vertex cache.

"Programmable tessellation unit. Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification. Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance."

Anti-aliasing features

"Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel). Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality. Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling. Temporal anti-aliasing. Gamma correct. Super AA (ATI CrossFire™ configurations only). All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering."

Texture filtering features

"2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel). 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering. Bicubic filtering. sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma). Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF). Depth and stencil texture (DST) format support. Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support."

HDCP

"HDCP is a content protection specification to protect digital content across the DVI/HDMI interface. The HDCP provides a robust, cost-effective and transparent method for transmitting and receiving digital entertainment similar to DVI/HDMI-compliant digital displays. HDCP encrypts the data transmitted between the DVI/HDMI connector on the graphics adapter and the display. To provide this support, both the graphics adapter and the display need to have an HDCP transmitter and receiver respectively."

CrossFire Multi-GPU Technology

"Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs. Integrated compositing engine. High performance dual channel interconnect."

MSI RADEON HD 3850 OC SPECIFICATIONS