Radeon HD 4670 1GB vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4670 1GB		70 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4670 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4670 1GB		35200 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (336%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be quite a bit (about 233%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4670 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4670 1GB		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56000 (233%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (about 433%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4670 1GB, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4670 1GB		6000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26000 (433%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.