Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 295X2, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1018 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 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 295X2		21205 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 14975 (240%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon R9 295X2		500 Watts
	Difference: 325 Watts (186%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 295X2 will be 317% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 486400 (317%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 will be quite a bit (more or less 348%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 278336 (348%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 295X2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 98304 (307%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.