Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270X, which features core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 270X should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 35072 (24%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X is a lot (about 203%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53600 (203%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X is a lot (approximately 21%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.