GeForce GTX 1070 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which comes with a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 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 1070		18174 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 11784 (184%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1070		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 1070 is 37% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1070		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 70144 (37%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1070 will be quite a bit (about 104%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1070		180720 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91920 (104%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1070 should be much (about 226%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1070		96384 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 66784 (226%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.