Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M385X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is much (more or less 44%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M385X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27200 (44%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (68%)

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 across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.