Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 240, which features core speeds of 730 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. 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 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 240, in theory, should perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 2304 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 should be quite a bit (more or less 37%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3912 (37%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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