Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 uses a 28 nm design. ATi has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which features a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency 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 ROPs.

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 7870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Radeon HD 7950 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 7870	Radeon HD 7950
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	March 2012	January 2012
Code Name	Pitcairn XT	Tahiti Pro
Fab Process	28 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	2048 MB	1536 MB
Core Speed	1000 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)	1250 MHz (5000 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1280	1792
Texture Mapping Units	80	112
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	384-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	175 watts	200 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	240000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	80000 Mtexels/sec	89600 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	32000 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen 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 clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.