Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R7 250X 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X 2GB will be quite a bit (approximately 223%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27600 (223%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250X 2GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (29%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 potential to reach the maximum fill rate.