GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 34 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 64992 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be much (about 75%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38160 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11876 (67%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.