GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which has a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 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

GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 4637 (74%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
	Difference: 90 (52%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7870		16 Mh/s
	Difference: 3 (19%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 970 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 should be quite a bit (about 37%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29200 (37%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is much (about 110%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (110%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount 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 amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.