Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 550, which has clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 550 should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 8704 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 will be a lot (approximately 65%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13824 (65%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (21%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 potential to get to the maximum fill rate.