Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 360, which features a clock frequency of 1050 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1625 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 768 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon R7 360 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 11200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 is much (more or less 91%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (57%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.