Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M380 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (approximately 100%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (100%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.