Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R7 M360

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M360, which features a GPU core clock speed of 1125 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 384 Stream Processors, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should perform much faster than the Radeon R7 M360 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M360		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (350%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M360 should be quite a bit (about 118%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M360		27000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14600 (118%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB should be a lot (about 38%) better at AA than the Radeon R7 M360, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M360		9000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3400 (38%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.