Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 214016 (202%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be quite a bit (approximately 499%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 106624 (499%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 290 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29824 (140%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.