Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 76 Watts (101%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon RX 460 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 2GB will be quite a bit (approximately 21%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10640 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11360 (65%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.