GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has a clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, 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

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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should perform 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 is a lot (about 69%) more effective at anisotropic filtering 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

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is a little bit (approximately 13%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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 get to the max fill rate.