Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units 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

Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 160 (3%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		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		175 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT will be 25% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a bit (about 11%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (8%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.