Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M275X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this model. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M275X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 33984 (47%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M275X is much (approximately 68%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14624 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M275X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6976 (48%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.