Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M390X should in theory perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 15872 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be quite a bit (more or less 251%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66144 (251%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is superior to the Radeon R9 M390X, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3264 (14%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.