Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 1120 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1750 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.