Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which comes with a clock speed of 1090 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 460 2GB should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 6016 (6%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 2GB will be a lot (more or less 186%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39664 (186%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (23%)

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. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per 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 this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.