Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 260X, which has a core clock frequency of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1625 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 512MB, in theory, should perform a bit faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 11200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be a lot (about 105%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31600 (105%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be a lot (approximately 47%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (47%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.