Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 580, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1257 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 580, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 209152 (395%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 should be a lot (more or less 1594%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 170320 (1594%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 580 is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29536 (276%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.