Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1625 MHz on this specific card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 235 Watts (204%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon R7 260X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 126400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X is a small bit (about 3%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (3%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is much (about 36%) better at FSAA than the Radeon R7 260X, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (36%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 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.