Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which features a clock frequency of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1625 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

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		6230 points
Radeon R7 260X		4381 points
	Difference: 1849 (42%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
Radeon R7 260X		95 Sol/s
	Difference: 77 (81%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
Radeon R7 260X		14 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (14%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 will be 48% quicker than the Radeon R7 260X in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 49600 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is quite a bit (approximately 30%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (30%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (82%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.