Both the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 retain their forebear's 320 Stream Processors, split into four arrays of eighty, coupled with both sixteen texturing units and ROPs. The tessellation unit also remains, as does HDMI support (with dedicated audio capabilities) as standard. However, gone is the 512-bit ring bus memory controller seen (and doubtless rarely used to its full potential) in R600, to be replaced by a narrower 256-bit ring bus controller, although this has supposedly been optimised to utilise bandwidth more efficiently.

In the same vein as NVIDIA's G92, RV670 sees an upgrade to its video processing capabilities over R600, seeing the UVD engine previously seen on ATI's mid-range and low-end offerings finally transplanted into the performance sector, and not before time. This allows for full acceleration of the entire video decoding processing when dealing with any High Definition movie format, be it H.264 or VC-1. Also as per G92, RV670 becomes the first ATI offering to support the PCI Express 2.0 standard, offering more bandwidth for anyone using a suitable PCI Express 2.0 equipped motherboard.