Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which features core clock speeds of 1120 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (133%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 480 4GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 1024 (0%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 4GB should be a lot (about 169%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 101280 (169%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 480 4GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11840 (49%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.