Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, 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

Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 1341 (21%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (40%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 will be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a little bit (more or less 1%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 800 (1%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (16%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many 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.