Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 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

Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 3360 (117%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (about 59%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29600 (59%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be just a bit (about 11%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6870, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (11%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.