Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which features core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 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
Radeon R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 447 (8%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 0 (0%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be a bit superior to the Radeon R9 270 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be much (about 23%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (23%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is superior to the Radeon R9 270, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.