Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which has core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6870 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon R9 M385X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X will be quite a bit (approximately 22%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (22%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a lot (about 64%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M385X, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (64%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.