Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R9 M265X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M265X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 575 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M265X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M265X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 72128 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be a bit (about 15%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M265X. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M265X		23000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3400 (15%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M265X		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17200 (187%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 are applied in one second. This number is worked out 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.