Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 240, which features a GPU core clock speed of 730 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 240 should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 2304 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 will be much (more or less 37%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3912 (37%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4848 (83%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.