Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M280X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 17984 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be a lot (approximately 136%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29024 (136%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.