Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1425 MHz on this specific model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 380 2G		8850 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 2460 (38%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 380 2G		19 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 4 (27%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory perform a bit faster than the Radeon R9 380 2G overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G should be a lot (more or less 22%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19840 (22%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 2G is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1440 (5%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed per second.

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