Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M380, which has a GPU core 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 made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M380 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is much (more or less 50%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (50%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.