Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which has a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory 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

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 134016 (126%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is much (more or less 319%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68224 (319%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be a little bit (more or less 20%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.