Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 250, which has core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1150 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 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 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 250 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 will be quite a bit (more or less 94%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (94%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB should be much (about 55%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R7 250, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.