Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 149% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 158016 (149%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (approximately 454%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97024 (454%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8224 (38%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.