In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2.

The HD 7850 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 3870. This results in the HD 7850 providing 49.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7850 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the HD 3870. This results in the HD 7850 providing 18 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 7850 was released over three years more recently than the HD 3870, and so the HD 7850 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 3870 when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition and the Radeon HD 3870 X2 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 7850 has 96 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 3870, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7850 is massively better than the HD 3870.

The Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 3870 X2 has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849 and the actual shader performance of the HD 3870 is 528. The HD 7850 having 321 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7850 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 3870.

The HD 7850 transistor size technology is 27 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 3870. This means that the HD 7850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 3870.

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 requires 165 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 7850. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7850 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the HD 3870. The HD 3870 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the HD 7850. The difference is significant enough that the HD 3870 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 7850.