Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R7 M265

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M265, which has GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be 350% faster than the Radeon R7 M265 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M265		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112128 (350%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be a lot (more or less 52%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M265. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M265		17400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9000 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M265		5800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20600 (355%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 colour ROPs 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.