Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 1260 (20%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Geforce GTX 680		16 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (7%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Geforce GTX 680 should theoretically be a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 256 (0%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be a lot (more or less 45%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39968 (45%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2592 (9%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.