Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 580, which comes with a clock speed of 1257 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 580 is 395% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general, because of its greater data rate. (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 (about 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 running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 580 is a better choice, 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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.