Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

Geforce GTX 690		13111 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 6881 (110%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 690 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 230912 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be a lot (approximately 193%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 154240 (193%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is quite a bit (approximately 83%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7870, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26560 (83%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.