Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 187008 (353%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be much (approximately 878%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93808 (878%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19168 (179%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 higher the texel rate, 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 the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.