Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB should be 20% quicker than the Radeon R9 M380 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be a lot (about 33%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (33%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is quite a bit (about 33%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (33%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.