Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270X, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 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 R9 270X		6590 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 200 (3%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 270X		18 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (20%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should be 7% quicker than the Radeon R9 270X in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be a little bit (approximately 11%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 270X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (8%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.