Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M395X will be 11% faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 15872 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X should be much (more or less 251%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66144 (251%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be a little bit (more or less 14%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M395X, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3264 (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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.