Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M380, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M380 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is much (more or less 50%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (50%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be quite a bit (more or less 50%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 M380, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (50%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.