GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (517%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GT 1030 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 142848 (291%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is quite a bit (approximately 119%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 1030. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48320 (119%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be much (more or less 46%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GT 1030, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9360 (46%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.