Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 360, which comes with core clock speeds of 1050 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 768 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 1GB should theoretically be a small bit faster than the Radeon R7 360 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 11200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 will be quite a bit (approximately 68%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 360 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.