Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R5 M255, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 940 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R5 M255 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89984 (562%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a small bit (more or less 14%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2576 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is quite a bit (more or less 184%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R5 M255, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13856 (184%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.