Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 470, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 926 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1650 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470		120 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (192%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon RX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 will be quite a bit (more or less 98%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58528 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5632 (23%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its 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 speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant 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.