In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 3850 X2 are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon R7 240 2GB.

The R7 240 has a 61 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 3850, but the HD 3850 has 12 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 240. As a result, the HD 3850 exhibits a 6.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 240. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 240 has a 61 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 3850, but the HD 3850 has 24 more Render Output Units than the R7 240. As a result, the HD 3850 exhibits a 15.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 240. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 240 was released over three years more recently than the HD 3850, and so the R7 240 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 3850 when running the latest games.

The R7 240 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 3850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The HD 3850 has 77.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 240, which means that the memory performance of the HD 3850 is much better than the R7 240.

The Radeon R7 240 2GB has 320 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 3850 X2 has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 240 is 212 and the actual shader performance of the HD 3850 is 428. The HD 3850 having 216 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 3850 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R7 240.

The R7 240 transistor size technology is 27 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 3850. This means that the R7 240 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 3850. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the R7 240 should consume less power than the HD 3850.

The Radeon R7 240 2GB requires 30 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 3850 X2 requires 140 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the R7 240 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the HD 3850. The HD 3850 requires 110 Watts more than the R7 240 to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD 3850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 240.