Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which comes with GPU core speed of 1090 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 460 2GB should theoretically be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 6016 (6%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 2GB will be a lot (approximately 186%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39664 (186%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (23%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.