Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260X, which features a clock frequency of 825 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 384 SPUs, 24 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R7 M260X should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260X is much (approximately 85%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9112 (85%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is superior to the Radeon R7 M260X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4088 (62%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics 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 colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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 maximum fill rate.