Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 250X will be 36% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 19008 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X should be a lot (more or less 274%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29312 (274%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X will be much (more or less 50%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5312 (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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.