Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 M260X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41984 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be a small bit (approximately 8%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1576 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is superior to the Radeon R7 M260X, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14776 (224%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.