Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon R9 M370X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M370X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1125 MHz on this specific card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M370X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M370X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 62400 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be quite a bit (about 58%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M370X. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M370X		32000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (58%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M370X		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are 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 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.