Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M395X should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88000 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X will be much (more or less 646%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80144 (646%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M395X is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10736 (87%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.