Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

The Radeon HD 4870 1GB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 260X, which features clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 output 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.