Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270X, which features clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 270X should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 73216 (69%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be a lot (approximately 274%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58624 (274%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X is a lot (more or less 50%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.