Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon R7 M265

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M265, which comes with core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon R7 M265 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M265		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (260%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be a lot (approximately 52%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 M265. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M265		17400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9000 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M265		5800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20600 (355%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its 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 speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.