Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 295X2, which features core clock speeds of 1018 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 295X2 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 534016 (504%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 is a lot (approximately 1576%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 336960 (1576%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 295X2 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 108928 (510%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.