Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260X, which features GPU core speed of 825 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 384 Stream Processors, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 M260X should be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260X is much (about 85%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9112 (85%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 1GB will be quite a bit (more or less 62%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 M260X, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4088 (62%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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