Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M395X, which features core speeds of 723 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M395X should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X should be a small bit (approximately 16%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12544 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8864 (38%)

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 over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus 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 ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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.