Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which has a clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (approximately 248%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 74496 (248%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is a lot (approximately 149%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17856 (149%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.