Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M380, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon R9 M380 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is a lot (approximately 33%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M380 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (33%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.