Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 470, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 926 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1650 MHz on this card. 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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon RX 470 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (83%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 will be quite a bit (more or less 349%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 92128 (349%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3232 (12%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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 get to the max fill rate.