Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1625 MHz on this particular model. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 260X is 96% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 51008 (96%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be much (about 476%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50912 (476%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 260X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6912 (65%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 get to the maximum fill rate.