Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280X will be 172% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 182016 (172%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be quite a bit (approximately 409%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87424 (409%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be much (approximately 27%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5824 (27%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.