Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 250, which has clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1150 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 250 should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (28%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 will be a lot (about 94%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (94%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4400 (55%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of 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.