GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 should in theory be much better than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 49920 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is a lot (about 104%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40832 (104%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be quite a bit (about 118%) better at AA than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17312 (118%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.