Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 590, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1469 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 590 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 156160 (147%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be much (about 890%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 190160 (890%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be quite a bit (approximately 120%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25632 (120%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels the video 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 Raster Operations Pipelines 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.