Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with core speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6790 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 28416 (27%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be a lot (about 57%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12224 (57%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7936 (59%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.