Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be a lot (more or less 237%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50624 (237%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7424 (35%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.