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 runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which has clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Radeon HD 7870 Amazon.com

Radeon R9 270 Amazon.com

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

Model	Radeon HD 7870	Radeon R9 270
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	March 2012	November 2013
Code Name	Pitcairn XT	Curacao Pro
Fab Process	28 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	1000 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)	1400 MHz (5600 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1280	1280
Texture Mapping Units	80	80
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11.2
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.3
Power (Max TDP)	175 watts	150 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	179200 MB/sec
Texel Rate	80000 Mtexels/sec	72000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	32000 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.