Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 XT has a GPU clock speed of 925 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M295X, which features core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.