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Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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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		6230 points
Radeon R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 287 (5%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (7%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270 should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be a bit (approximately 11%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (11%)

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

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Radeon HD 7870

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Radeon R9 270

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	Radeon HD 7870	Radeon R9 270
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	March 2012	November 2013
Code Name	Pitcairn XT	Curacao Pro
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	1000 MHz	900 MHz
Memory Speed	4800 MHz	5600 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	175 watts	150 watts
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	179200 MB/sec
Texel Rate	80000 Mtexels/sec	72000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	32000 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	1280	1280
Texture Mapping Units	80	80
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	2800 million	2800 million
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.3

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.

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