Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be a bit superior to the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 17984 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X should be much (more or less 136%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29024 (136%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be quite a bit (about 48%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R9 M280X, and capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6976 (48%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.