Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 275 Watts (367%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 142400 (162%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a little bit (approximately 19%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (19%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (67%)

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.