Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 460, which features core speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 460 will be 6% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 will be quite a bit (more or less 186%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a lot (approximately 23%) more effective at AA than the Radeon RX 460, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460		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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.