GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which has GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 26592 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (about 58%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29360 (58%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (approximately 81%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 275, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14276 (81%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.