Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 360, which has a clock speed of 1050 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1625 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 768 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should be 39% quicker than the Radeon R7 360 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 40128 (39%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 should be quite a bit (approximately 91%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (57%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.