Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1090 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 512MB is 3% quicker than the Radeon RX 460 2GB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (3%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 2GB is a lot (about 103%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31040 (103%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 460 2GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5440 (45%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling 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 the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.