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Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

The Radeon HD 6870 has core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which features a core clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1400 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

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

The Radeon R9 270 should in theory perform much 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 much (approximately 43%) more effective at anisotropic filtering 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 the exact same pixel rate, so in theory they should perform equally good at at full screen anti-aliasing, and be able to handle 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

Radeon HD 6870

Amazon.com

Radeon R9 270

Amazon.com

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Model Radeon HD 6870 Radeon R9 270
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year October 2010 November 2013
Code Name Barts XT Curacao Pro
Fab Process 40 nm 28 nm
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory 1024 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 900 MHz 900 MHz
Shader Speed N/A MHz (N/A) MHz
Memory Speed 1050 MHz (4200 MHz effective) 1400 MHz (5600 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders 1120 1280
Texture Mapping Units 56 80
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.1 OpenGL 4.3
Power (Max TDP) 151 watts 150 watts
Shader Model 5.0 5.0
Bandwidth 134400 MB/sec 179200 MB/sec
Texel Rate 50400 Mtexels/sec 72000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 28800 Mpixels/sec 28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one 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 higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

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

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