GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units 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

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 950 in general. (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 much (about 81%) better at texture 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 running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is a better choice, though not by far. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.