Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M395X is 426% faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 129600 (426%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X will be much (approximately 2792%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 89344 (2792%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M395X is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19936 (623%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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