Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M380, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M380 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is a lot (more or less 274%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29312 (274%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M380 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5312 (50%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of 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 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics 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 colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.