Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M270X, which comes with a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M270X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 81600 (113%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be much (more or less 134%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39000 (134%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is superior to the Radeon R9 M270X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15600 (134%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.