Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon R7 360

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 360, which comes with core clock speeds of 1050 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 768 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 360		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 2GB should in theory be just a bit better than the Radeon R7 360 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 360		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 11200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 will be a lot (about 68%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (68%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 360 is a lot (more or less 40%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R7 360		16800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (40%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.