Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which has GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 172800 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be a lot (about 263%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78800 (263%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (127%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 ability to reach the max fill rate.