Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which features core clock speeds of 1050 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 278016 (262%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is a lot (more or less 765%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 163424 (765%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45824 (214%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.