Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 285, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 918 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 285 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 70016 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is quite a bit (approximately 381%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81440 (381%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (37%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.