Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 390 8G		12733 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 9863 (344%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon R9 390 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 124 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 390 8G should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 249600 (186%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G is a lot (more or less 217%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		160000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109600 (217%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390 8G is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		64000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (122%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.