Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 480, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this particular model. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units 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 RX 480		13349 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 6959 (109%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 12 (80%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 480 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 70144 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is quite a bit (approximately 82%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72480 (82%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6240 (21%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.