Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250X, which comes with a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1125 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 HD 6870		2870 points
Radeon R7 250X		2860 points
	Difference: 10 (0%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 56 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 will be 87% quicker than the Radeon R7 250X in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 62400 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (more or less 26%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 250X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10400 (26%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (80%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.