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Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB features a core clock frequency of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which has clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 380 4G should be 58% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (58%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G is a lot (more or less 262%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78640 (262%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 4G is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		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

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Radeon HD 4870 2GB

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Radeon R9 380 4G

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	Radeon HD 4870 2GB	Radeon R9 380 4G
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	Jun 25, 2008	June 2015
Code Name	RV770 XT	Antigua PRO
Memory	2048 MB	4096 MB
Core Speed	750 MHz	970 MHz
Memory Speed	3600 MHz	5700 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	150 watts	190 watts
Bandwidth	115200 MB/sec	182400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	30000 Mtexels/sec	108640 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	12000 Mpixels/sec	31040 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	800(160x5)	1792
Texture Mapping Units	40	112
Render Output Units	16	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	55 nm	28 nm
Transistors	956 million	5000 million
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 ×16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 12.0
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.5

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

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