GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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 950		6536 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 146 (2%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 950		10 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (50%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (106%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GTX 950 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 86272 (82%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be quite a bit (more or less 81%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39648 (81%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3168 (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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

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