Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

The Radeon HD 7850 features a GPU core clock speed of 860 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which features GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 7850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 7870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 7850	Radeon HD 7870
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	March 2012	March 2012
Code Name	Pitcairn Pro	Pitcairn XT
Fab Process	28 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	860 MHz	1000 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1024	1280
Texture Mapping Units	64	80
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	130 watts	175 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	55040 Mtexels/sec	80000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	27520 Mpixels/sec	32000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.