GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 7870		6230 points
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 2580 (71%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 480 will be 16% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 23808 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be a lot (about 90%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38000 (90%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be a little bit (approximately 5%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (5%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.