GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has GPU core speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		3466 points
	Difference: 2924 (84%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
	Difference: 63744 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be much (approximately 69%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36192 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3296 (13%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.