Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 2000 MHz on this model. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 480 is 147% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 156160 (147%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 should be quite a bit (about 654%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 139904 (654%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 will be much (approximately 68%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14464 (68%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed 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 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.