Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270X, which has a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1400 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 170 Watts (94%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is 29% quicker than the Radeon R9 270X overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (29%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X is a lot (more or less 33%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (33%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends 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.