Radeon HD 4350 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which features core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4350		22 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 153 Watts (695%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4350 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4350		8000 MB/sec
	Difference: 145600 (1820%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be much (approximately 1639%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4350. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		4600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 75400 (1639%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4350		2300 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29700 (1291%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many 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.