Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 M260X, which has core clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should in theory be a little bit superior to the Radeon R7 M260X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260X will be much (more or less 60%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7400 (60%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB is quite a bit (approximately 88%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R7 M260X, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5800 (88%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of 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 the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.