Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M280X, which has a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M280X should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (189%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be quite a bit (approximately 1475%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47200 (1475%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X should be much (more or less 350%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (350%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen 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 number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends 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.