Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270, which has core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 270 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 73216 (69%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be quite a bit (about 237%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50624 (237%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7424 (35%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.