Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R5 M255, which features a clock frequency of 940 MHz and a DDR3 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 64-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon R5 M255 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89984 (562%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be a little bit (approximately 14%) better at AF than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2576 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be quite a bit (more or less 184%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R5 M255, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13856 (184%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.