Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which comes with clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 380 2G should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 76416 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G will be much (more or less 408%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87264 (408%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 2G is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9664 (45%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.