Radeon Vega 7 vs ATI HD 3870

Place in the ranking	993	530
Place by popularity	not in top-100	39
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	0.06	no data
Power efficiency	0.95	11.56
Architecture	TeraScale (2005−2013)	GCN 5.1 (2018−2022)
GPU code name	RV670	Cezanne
Market segment	Desktop	Laptop
Release date	19 November 2007 (17 years ago)	13 April 2021 (3 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$269	no data

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

no data

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	320	448
Core clock speed	777 MHz	300 MHz
Boost clock speed	no data	1900 MHz
Number of transistors	666 million	9,800 million
Manufacturing process technology	55 nm	7 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	106 Watt	45 Watt
Texture fill rate	12.43	53.20
Floating-point processing power	0.4973 TFLOPS	1.702 TFLOPS
ROPs	16	8
TMUs	16	28

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Interface	PCIe 2.0 x16	IGP
Length	241 mm	no data
Width	2-slot	no data
Supplementary power connectors	1x 6-pin	None

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR4	System Shared
Maximum RAM amount	512 MB	System Shared
Memory bus width	256 Bit	System Shared
Memory clock speed	1126 MHz	System Shared
Memory bandwidth	72.06 GB/s	no data
Shared memory	-	+

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors

2x DVI, 1x S-Video

No outputs

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	10.1 (10_1)	12 (12_1)
Shader Model	4.1	6.4
OpenGL	3.3	4.6
OpenCL	N/A	2.1
Vulkan	N/A	1.2

Gaming performance

Let's see how good the compared graphics cards are for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS.

Average FPS across all PC games

Here are the average frames per second in a large set of popular games across different resolutions:

Full HD	4−5 −450%	22 +450%
1440p	5−6 −460%	28 +460%
4K	3−4 −567%	20 +567%

Cost per frame, $

1080p	67.25	no data
1440p	53.80	no data
4K	89.67	no data

Pros & cons summary

Performance score	1.44	7.46
Recency	19 November 2007	13 April 2021
Chip lithography	55 nm	7 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	106 Watt	45 Watt

Vega 7 has a 418.1% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 13 years, a 685.7% more advanced lithography process, and 135.6% lower power consumption.

The Radeon Vega 7 is our recommended choice as it beats the Radeon HD 3870 in performance tests.

Be aware that Radeon HD 3870 is a desktop card while Radeon Vega 7 is a notebook one.

Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.