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AMD Radeon E8870

AMD Radeon E8870: In-Depth Analysis of a Graphics Card for Professionals and Enthusiasts

April 2025

Introduction

The AMD Radeon E8870 is a specialized graphics card designed for professional tasks and moderate gaming. Despite its release in 2016, it remains relevant in the niche of workstations and budget systems. In this article, we will analyze its features, performance, and practical value in 2025.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The E8870 is built on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) 3.0 microarchitecture, which provides a balance between performance and energy efficiency.

Manufacturing Process: The chip is made using a 28nm technology—an outdated standard by modern measures, but it demonstrated good optimization for its time.

Unique Features:

- AMD FidelityFX: Support for basic image clarity enhancement algorithms (similar to NVIDIA DLSS but less advanced).

- Eyefinity: Ability to connect up to 6 monitors for multitasking.

- OpenCL 2.0: Acceleration of parallel computing.

Note: Ray tracing is not supported due to the lack of hardware RT Cores.

2. Memory: Speed and Impact on Performance

Type and Capacity: The card is equipped with 4GB GDDR5 memory with a 256-bit bus.

Bandwidth:

- Peak Speed: 160 GB/s.

- Memory Frequency: 5 GHz (effective).

Impact on Performance:

- For 2025 games, 4GB of memory is the minimum threshold. In projects with HD textures (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077), stuttering may occur at Ultra settings.

- In professional applications (Autodesk Maya, Blender), this amount of memory is sufficient for working with moderately complex models.

3. Gaming Performance

1080p (Full HD):

- CS2 (Counter-Strike 2): ~120 FPS on High.

- Apex Legends: ~60 FPS on Medium.

- The Witcher 3: ~45 FPS on Ultra (without HairWorks).

1440p (QHD):

- Requires lowering settings to Medium. For instance, Fortnite will yield ~50 FPS.

4K:

- Not recommended—averages around 25-30 FPS in GTA VI on Low settings.

Ray Tracing: Not supported. Alternatives are software methods, but they reduce performance by 40-60%.

4. Professional Tasks

Video Editing:

- In DaVinci Resolve, rendering a 4K video will take about ~30 minutes (compared to 10 minutes with NVIDIA RTX 4060).

3D Modeling:

- Blender (Cycles): Rendering a moderately complex scene will take about ~2 hours (using OpenCL).

Scientific Calculations:

- Support for OpenCL allows for work in MATLAB or SPECviewperf, but speed is inferior to modern cards with CUDA (NVIDIA) or HIP (AMD RDNA 4).

5. Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation

TDP: 100W—a modest figure even for 2025.

Cooling:

- A case with 2-3 fans is recommended for stable operation under load.

- For extended render sessions, consider a liquid cooling solution (e.g., Arctic Liquid Freezer II 120).

Compatibility:

- Minimum case size: Mid-Tower.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD:

- Radeon Pro W6600 (8GB GDDR6): 2.5 times faster in gaming, but priced at $600 compared to $250 for the E8870.

NVIDIA:

- Quadro P2000 (5GB GDDR5): Similar performance but better optimization for CUDA.

- GeForce GTX 1650 (4GB GDDR6): 30% faster in gaming but weaker in professional tasks.

Conclusion: The E8870 excels in the budget segment for workstations, but for gaming, it is better to choose modern alternatives.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply:

- Minimum of 400W (e.g., Corsair CX450).

- For overclocking—500W (Seasonic S12III 500).

Compatibility:

- Platform: PCIe 3.0 x16 (compatible with PCIe 4.0/5.0 but without speed gains).

- Processors: Best combined with AMD Ryzen 5 5600 or Intel Core i5-12400F.

Drivers:

- OS support: Windows 10/11, Linux (AMDGPU Pro).

- Not frequently updated, but stability is at a reasonable level.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low price ($200-250 for new units).

- Reliability and long lifespan.

- Support for multi-monitor configurations.

Cons:

- Outdated architecture.

- Lack of hardware ray tracing.

- Limited memory capacity.

9. Final Verdict: Who is the E8870 Suitable For?

This graphics card is suitable for:

1. Budget Workstations: Video editing, 2D design, light 3D modeling.

2. Office PCs with multi-monitor setups.

3. Gamers playing older or less demanding projects.

If you need a compromise between price and performance for less resource-intensive tasks, the E8870 is worth considering. However, for modern games and complex rendering, it's better to look into models based on RDNA 3/4 or NVIDIA Ada Lovelace.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

September 2015

Model Name

Radeon E8870

Generation

Embedded

Bus Interface

MXM-B (3.0)

Transistors

2,080 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

28 nm

Architecture

GCN 2.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

1500MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

96.00 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

16.00 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

48.00 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

96.00 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.505 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

768

L1 Cache

16 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

256KB

TDP

75W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.2

OpenCL Version

2.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_0)

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.3

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.505 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost

1.617 +7.4%

Radeon R7 260

1.567 +4.1%

Radeon E8870

1.505

GeForce GTX 570 Rev. 2

1.433 -4.8%

Radeon RX 550X 640SP

1.398 -7.1%