Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 460, which features clock speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB will be 3% quicker than the Radeon RX 460 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (3%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 should be a lot (approximately 131%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 460		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34640 (131%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB will be quite a bit (more or less 51%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 460, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8960 (51%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.