Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 560

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 560, which comes with a clock frequency of 1175 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 560 will be 8% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 560		114688 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 8704 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 560 is a lot (approximately 252%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 560		75200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53824 (252%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is just a bit (about 14%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 560, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 560		18800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2576 (14%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one 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 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.