GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 104 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 295, in theory, should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 31776 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be just a bit (about 4%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3360 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2656 (9%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.