GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 260 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 41712 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be much (approximately 117%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43136 (117%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is much (about 98%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 260, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15872 (98%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.