Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with GPU clock speed of 933 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (approximately 74%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44496 (74%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be quite a bit (approximately 24%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5856 (24%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 potential to get to the max fill rate.