Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 285, which comes with a core clock speed of 918 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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		6230 points
	Difference: 2270 (36%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 285		18 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (13%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 285 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is a lot (approximately 29%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22816 (29%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2624 (9%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.