Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 XT uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which features core speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.