Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 470, which comes with core clock speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 470 should be much 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 should be a lot (more or less 349%) faster with regards to anisotropic 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

The Radeon RX 470 will be just a bit (about 12%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.