Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 360, which features a clock speed of 1050 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1625 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 768 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 1GB should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon R7 360 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 11200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 is quite a bit (more or less 68%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 360 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (40%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.