Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 715 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon R7 M260 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 36992 (231%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 is quite a bit (more or less 61%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6472 (61%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4968 (87%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 per second.

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