Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should theoretically be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 7790 overall. (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 quite a bit (more or less 162%) better at AF 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 running with high levels of AA 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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.