GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which features clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 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

GeForce GTX 950		6536 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 306 (5%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 950		10 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (60%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 950		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 17 (11%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (94%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 950 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 47872 (45%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be much (approximately 63%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30848 (63%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is superior to the Radeon HD 7870, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 768 (2%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.