GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 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 7870 XT		6390 points
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		3466 points
	Difference: 2924 (84%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT is 50% faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
	Difference: 63744 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be quite a bit (about 69%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36192 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3296 (13%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.