Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 550, which has GPU core speed of 1100 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 512 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 550, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 8704 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 should be quite a bit (approximately 65%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13824 (65%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (21%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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