GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 26592 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is a lot (about 58%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29360 (58%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is quite a bit (more or less 81%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 275, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14276 (81%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one 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 processed in one 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. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.