Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M380, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 M380 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9984 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is a lot (more or less 87%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18624 (87%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be much (about 34%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M380, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5376 (34%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated 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 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number 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 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.