Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which has a core clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M385X is 81% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X should be a lot (approximately 476%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50912 (476%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is quite a bit (more or less 65%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6912 (65%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.