Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1090 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 460 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (71%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is much (approximately 45%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27760 (45%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is superior to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (70%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 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 clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.