GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features 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

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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

GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 4477 (70%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 4 (27%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 970 should in theory perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be a lot (about 23%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (23%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37600 (127%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.