Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270X will be 56% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be much (approximately 203%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53600 (203%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (21%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.