Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1425 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon R9 380X overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X will be quite a bit (about 40%) faster with regards to 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

The Radeon R9 380X should be a little bit (more or less 5%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 ability to reach the max fill rate.