Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which features GPU clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (approximately 454%) better at AF 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

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (more or less 38%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.