Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 380X, which has GPU clock speed of 970 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1425 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 380X should be much faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 38272 (27%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X is a lot (approximately 370%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97760 (370%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380X is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4640 (18%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.