Radeon HD 3850 256MB vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which features a core clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M390X should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 107008 (202%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be a lot (about 766%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81856 (766%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X is a lot (about 116%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12448 (116%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.