Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon R9 M265X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M265X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 575 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M265X should theoretically perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M265X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 19008 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M265X is a lot (approximately 115%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M265X		23000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12312 (115%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 512MB will be a little bit (about 16%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 M265X, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M265X		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1488 (16%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.