Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280X should be 172% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 182016 (172%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is a lot (more or less 409%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87424 (409%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be a lot (about 27%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5824 (27%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.