Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with a core clock frequency of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 134016 (126%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (about 389%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83120 (389%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8480 (40%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 rate also depends 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.