Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which has GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 270		5943 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 3073 (107%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 270 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be a lot (more or less 43%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (43%)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel rate, so in theory they should perform equally good at at FSAA, and be capable of handling the same screen resolutions. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.