Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which features GPU core speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 47616 (45%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be quite a bit (about 157%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33664 (157%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (more or less 29%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6144 (29%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.