Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with core speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon R9 M385X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9984 (10%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X will be much (more or less 188%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40224 (188%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (21%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved 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 once 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.