Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M260X, which features GPU core speed of 825 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 384 Stream Processors, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is 125% quicker than the Radeon R7 M260X in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80128 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be a lot (approximately 33%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R7 M260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6600 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19800 (300%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.