Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M390X, which comes with a clock frequency of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M390X should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 54016 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be a lot (more or less 333%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71168 (333%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M390X is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1760 (8%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.