GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has a clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		17120 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 10730 (168%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		22 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 7 (47%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 980 Ti		250 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		336000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a lot (approximately 98%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		176000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87200 (98%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be a lot (more or less 224%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		96000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 66400 (224%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could 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 ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.