GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which has GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 34 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTS 150 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (380%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be much (approximately 69%) better at AF than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32640 (69%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be a lot (more or less 170%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 150, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20160 (170%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.