Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this 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
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 3520 (123%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 34 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is a lot (approximately 76%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (76%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.