Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which features GPU clock speed of 1717 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 1408 SPUs, 88 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 5500 XT		130 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 176384 (333%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT is much (more or less 1314%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 140408 (1314%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT is quite a bit (approximately 414%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44256 (414%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.