Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should theoretically be a little bit better than the Radeon R7 M260X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260X should be a lot (about 60%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7400 (60%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB is a lot (more or less 88%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 M260X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5800 (88%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.