Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is quite a bit (more or less 81%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48800 (81%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X will be a little bit (more or less 13%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.