GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator 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
GeForce GTX 960M		4350 points
	Difference: 1880 (43%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (169%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be a lot (about 82%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36160 (82%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the GeForce GTX 960M, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14464 (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.