Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 47616 (45%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (about 274%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58624 (274%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10624 (50%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its 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 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.