Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has a core clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Geforce GTX 690		13111 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 6721 (105%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 690 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192512 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is quite a bit (more or less 164%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 145440 (164%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be a lot (more or less 98%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28960 (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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.