Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 380X, which comes with a core clock speed of 970 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1425 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 380X		9519 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 3129 (49%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 380X		19 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 4 (27%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon R9 380X		190 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should be a bit faster than the Radeon R9 380X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380X		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X is quite a bit (more or less 40%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35360 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380X is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1440 (5%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.