Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which has core speeds of 1050 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2816 SPUs along with 176 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 390X 8G will be 262% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 278016 (262%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is a lot (more or less 765%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 163424 (765%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G is quite a bit (more or less 214%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45824 (214%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.