Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 240, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 730 MHz. The DDR3 memory works at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB should theoretically perform a lot faster than the Radeon R7 240 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 24192 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 will be much (about 37%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3912 (37%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB is quite a bit (more or less 83%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 240, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4848 (83%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many 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.