GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs 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 1060		12359 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 5969 (93%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 1060, in theory, should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 will be quite a bit (more or less 36%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31680 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42688 (144%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 applied per second.

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