GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 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 470		2937 points
	Difference: 3453 (118%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 58080 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is quite a bit (approximately 161%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54808 (161%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is much (approximately 22%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 470, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5320 (22%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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 get to the max fill rate.