GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has core speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti should theoretically perform much 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 (more or less 98%) better at anisotropic 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

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 in one second. This figure is worked out 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.