Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2, in theory, should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 M385X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9984 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X should be quite a bit (approximately 188%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40224 (188%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a lot (about 21%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M385X, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (21%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.