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Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB has a 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 is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which comes with core speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units 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

In theory, the Radeon R9 380 4G should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall. (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 will be much (approximately 262%) better at texture 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 lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 4G is the winner, by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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

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