Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which has GPU core 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 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 270 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be a lot (approximately 140%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42000 (140%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is much (about 140%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (140%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.