Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M290X should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be much (more or less 127%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38000 (127%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (127%)

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 interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.