Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which comes with clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units 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 XT		6390 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 1190 (23%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (15%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a lot (approximately 61%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33760 (61%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is just a bit (about 8%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7850, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 high resolutions.

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

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