Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which has GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is 10% quicker than the Radeon HD 7790 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9984 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be a lot (more or less 162%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34624 (162%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5376 (34%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.