Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 470, which comes with GPU core speed of 926 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1650 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 470 should theoretically be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 67072 (47%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 will be much (more or less 349%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 92128 (349%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, but only just. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3232 (12%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.