Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon RX 560

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 560, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1175 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 560		80 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 71 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6870 should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon RX 560 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
Radeon RX 560		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 19712 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 560 is a lot (more or less 49%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon RX 560		75200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (49%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the Radeon RX 560, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 560		18800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (53%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.