Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M260X, which comes with core clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be much faster than the Radeon R7 M260X overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a small bit (about 8%) better 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 lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is superior to the Radeon R7 M260X, by a large margin. (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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.