Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which has GPU clock speed of 1050 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also features 2816 Stream Processors, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (267%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 331008 (625%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be quite a bit (approximately 1629%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 174112 (1629%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56512 (529%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.