Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which features a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 should be 126% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (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 much (more or less 319%) more effective at AF 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 a bit (about 20%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.