Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 360, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1050 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1625 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 768 Stream Processors, 48 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 360 should be 96% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 51008 (96%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 is much (more or less 372%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39712 (372%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 is quite a bit (more or less 57%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6112 (57%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.