Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which comes with a core clock frequency of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 52992 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be a lot (about 100%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10688 (100%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is much (approximately 100%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10688 (100%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 Raster Operations Pipelines 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.