GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 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

Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
GeForce GTX 870M		4770 points
	Difference: 1460 (31%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 will be 60% faster than the GeForce GTX 870M overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M is quite a bit (about 32%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25392 (32%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the GeForce GTX 870M, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9416 (42%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied 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 handling 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 video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.