Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M260, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 715 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be 562% faster than the Radeon R7 M260 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89984 (562%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be much (about 25%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4216 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15656 (274%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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