Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R7 250X 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, which comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (84%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 81600 (113%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (about 100%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (100%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be much (approximately 100%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, and also able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.