Radeon HD 3870 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 memory. It features 768 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 360 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (44%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 is much (about 306%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38000 (306%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 360 is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4400 (35%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.