Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260, which features core clock speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon R7 M260 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (620%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB will be a lot (about 75%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 M260. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12840 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 2GB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6280 (110%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.