Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which has GPU clock speed of 1100 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1625 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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		6230 points
Radeon R7 260X		4381 points
	Difference: 1849 (42%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
Radeon R7 260X		95 Sol/s
	Difference: 77 (81%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
Radeon R7 260X		14 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (14%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R7 260X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 49600 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (approximately 30%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is quite a bit (more or less 82%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 260X, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (82%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.