Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M395X, which has a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M395X should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (39%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X will be much (more or less 251%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66144 (251%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be just a bit (more or less 14%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M395X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3264 (14%)

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 across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.