Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 470, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 926 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1650 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470		120 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 470 is 83% faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (83%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 should be quite a bit (approximately 295%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 88528 (295%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 should be much (about 147%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17632 (147%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.