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Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 comes with a GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270, which features GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 270 should be a small 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 will be a little bit (about 11%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be just a bit (more or less 11%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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

Amazon.com

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Radeon R9 270

Amazon.com

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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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

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