Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 270 should perform 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 is quite a bit (about 237%) more effective at AF 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 the winner, 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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.