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Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB has clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M275X, which comes with a core clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1125 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M275X		50 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 56 Watts (112%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M275X is quite a bit (approximately 190%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23600 (190%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M275X is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (16%)

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 3870 1GB

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Radeon R9 M275X

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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 3870 1GB	Radeon R9 M275X
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	Nov 19, 2007	May 1 2014
Code Name	RV670 XT	Venus XTX
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	775 MHz	900 MHz
Memory Speed	2250 MHz	4500 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	106 watts	50 watts
Bandwidth	72000 MB/sec	72000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	12400 Mtexels/sec	36000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	12400 Mpixels/sec	14400 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	320(64x5)	640
Texture Mapping Units	16	40
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR4	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit
Fab Process	55 nm	28 nm
Transistors	(Unknown) million	(Unknown) million
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16/AGP 8x	PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.

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