GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870, which has core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 8800 GTX in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (more or less 117%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43200 (117%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GTX, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (132%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.