Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 825 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB is 13% quicker than the Radeon R7 M260X overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260X will be a lot (approximately 60%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260X		19800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7400 (60%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 1GB is superior to the Radeon R7 M260X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 M260X		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5800 (88%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum amount 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.