In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 3850 AGP are significantly better than the AMD Radeon X1900 GT Rev. 2.

The HD 3850 was released over a year more recently than the X1900 GT, and so the HD 3850 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the X1900 GT.

The HD 3850 has 256 MB more video memory than the X1900 GT, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 3850 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 3850 has 10.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the X1900 GT, which means that the memory performance of the HD 3850 is slightly better than the X1900 GT.

The Radeon X1900 GT Rev. 2 has 36 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 3850 AGP has 320. However, the actual shader performance of the X1900 GT is 12 and the actual shader performance of the HD 3850 is 214. The HD 3850 having 202 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 3850 delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the X1900 GT.

The Radeon X1900 GT Rev. 2 requires 75 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 3850 AGP requires 75 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the HD 3850, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the X1900 GT. The two GPUs require the same amount of wattage to run. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.