GeForce RTX 3050 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3050		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce RTX 3050 should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 37376 (19%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3050 is a lot (approximately 40%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35360 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3050 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		49664 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20064 (68%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.