Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 makes use of a 28 nm design. ATi has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 270, which features a core clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1400 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 7870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Radeon R9 270 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 7870	Radeon R9 270
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved 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 memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.