Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 360, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1050 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1625 MHz on this specific card. It features 768 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be 2% quicker than the Radeon R7 360 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 1984 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 is much (approximately 136%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29024 (136%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4576 (27%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.