Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with core clock speeds of 723 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M395X should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (39%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X will be a lot (approximately 208%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62544 (208%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M395X is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.