Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon R7 M360

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M360, which features a core clock speed of 1125 MHz and a DDR3 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 64-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is 260% quicker than the Radeon R7 M360 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M360		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (260%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M360 should be much (more or less 118%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M360		27000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14600 (118%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M360		9000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3400 (38%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.