Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 580, which comes with GPU core speed of 1257 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 580, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 156160 (147%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 is quite a bit (approximately 747%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 159632 (747%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 is much (approximately 88%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18848 (88%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.