Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which comes with core clock speeds of 723 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M390X should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (39%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X should be much (more or less 208%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62544 (208%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M390X is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11136 (93%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.