GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 480 should perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be much (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

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.