In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 380X are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition.

The HD 7850 has a 5 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon R9 380X, but the Radeon R9 380X has 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7850. As a result, the Radeon R9 380X exhibits a 61.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 7850. 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 5 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon R9 380X and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 7850 providing 0.2 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 Radeon R9 380X was released over three years more recently than the HD 7850, and so the Radeon R9 380X is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 7850 when running the latest games.

The Radeon R9 380X has 3072 MB more video memory than the HD 7850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon R9 380X also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon R9 380X has 28.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7850, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon R9 380X is slightly better than the HD 7850.

The Radeon R9 380X has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon R9 380X is 1689 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849. The Radeon R9 380X having 840 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon R9 380X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7850.

The Radeon R9 380X requires 190 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the Radeon R9 380X and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7850. The two GPUs have been recommended a PSU with the same amount of wattage. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.