Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which has a core clock frequency of 926 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1650 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (192%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 470 4GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is quite a bit (approximately 98%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58528 (98%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB should be a lot (approximately 23%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5632 (23%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.