Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M280X should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 35008 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X should be much (more or less 372%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39712 (372%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M280X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3712 (35%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.