Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 Nano

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 Nano, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The HBM RAM runs at a frequency of 500 MHz on this card. It features 4096 SPUs as well as 256 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 Nano		14918 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 8688 (139%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 Nano		402 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
	Difference: 230 (134%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 Nano		30 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 14 (88%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 Nano will be 233% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 Nano		512000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 358400 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 Nano is much (more or less 220%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 Nano		256000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 176000 (220%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 Nano is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 Nano		64000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (100%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.