Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which comes with clock speeds of 1717 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 5500 XT will be 219% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 157376 (219%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be much (more or less 1119%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 138696 (1119%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42544 (343%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.