Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480, which has a clock frequency of 1120 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 480 will be 128% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 146944 (128%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is much (more or less 511%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 134880 (511%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 should be quite a bit (approximately 36%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9440 (36%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out 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 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 maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.