Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M380, which features a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M380 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is much (approximately 274%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29312 (274%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M380 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.