Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 240, which has clock speeds of 730 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be 268% faster than the Radeon R7 240 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 77184 (268%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be a lot (about 46%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 240. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6776 (46%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a lot (approximately 266%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 240, and capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15536 (266%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.