Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with clock speeds of 1469 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 590 will be 14% quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
	Difference: 31744 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 should be a lot (approximately 253%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 151536 (253%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be much (more or less 96%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23008 (96%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range 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 number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.