Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 380 2G should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (58%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G should be quite a bit (approximately 262%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78640 (262%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 2G is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19040 (159%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.