GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs 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

GeForce GTX 1060		12359 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 5969 (93%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 1060 will be 2% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 4608 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 will be a lot (approximately 36%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31680 (36%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 is much (about 144%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42688 (144%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.