Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon RX 560

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 560, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1175 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this model. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 560		80 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 71 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6870 should theoretically be a small bit faster than the Radeon RX 560 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon RX 560		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 19712 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 560 should be quite a bit (about 49%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon RX 560		75200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (49%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 560		18800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (53%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.