Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 2GB should be 11% faster than the Radeon R7 360 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 11200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 should be much (more or less 68%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 360 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (40%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.