Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950, which has GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

The Radeon HD 7950 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be just a bit (about 12%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, by far. (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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.