Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7950, which comes with a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 134016 (126%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be a lot (more or less 319%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68224 (319%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be just a bit (more or less 20%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4224 (20%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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