GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 114 Watts (65%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 295, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70176 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a bit (more or less 15%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (15%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a little bit (more or less 1%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 256 (1%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.