GeForce GT 210 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 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 210		31 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 154 Watts (497%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GT 210 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 210		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 179200 (1400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be quite a bit (about 1785%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 210. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 210		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84088 (1785%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is superior to the GeForce GT 210, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 210		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27244 (1156%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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