Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with core speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850, in theory, should be much faster than 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 is quite a bit (more or less 157%) better at anisotropic filtering 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 should be much (about 29%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a 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 called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.