Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 1501 (24%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
	Difference: 63 (37%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (31%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 should be 56% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a small bit (more or less 12%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (12%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (more or less 25%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7950, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (25%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.