Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M295X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M295X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M295X should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (53%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X is quite a bit (about 220%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66000 (220%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M295X is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (100%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.