GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 980M		9476 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 3086 (48%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (85%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 980M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be a small bit (approximately 12%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10848 (12%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M is much (more or less 124%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 36832 (124%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.