Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon R9 390 8G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 390 8G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
Radeon R9 390 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (159%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 390 8G should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		384000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 326400 (567%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390 8G is a lot (approximately 1190%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		160000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 147600 (1190%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390 8G is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 390 8G		64000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 51600 (416%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.