Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 285, which comes with a core clock frequency of 918 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 285		8500 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 2110 (33%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 285		18 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (20%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon R9 285 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is a small bit (more or less 16%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14016 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 224 (1%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.