GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 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

Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
GeForce GTX 470		2937 points
	Difference: 3453 (118%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 58080 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is much (more or less 161%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54808 (161%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is a lot (more or less 22%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 470, and capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5320 (22%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.