Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 360, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1050 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1625 MHz on this model. It features 768 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 512MB is 11% faster than the Radeon R7 360 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 11200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 should be much (more or less 68%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 360 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (40%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.