GeForce GTX 1050 3GB vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (147%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		86016 MB/sec
	Difference: 105984 (123%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is a lot (more or less 33%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		66816 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21984 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1050 3GB		33408 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3808 (13%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.