Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M390X should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 54016 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be a lot (approximately 333%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71168 (333%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X will be just a bit (approximately 8%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1760 (8%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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