Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 240, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 730 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 158 Watts (527%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 should be much faster than the Radeon R7 240 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (433%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (more or less 366%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 240. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53400 (366%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be quite a bit (approximately 366%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R7 240, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21360 (366%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.