GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features GPU clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, 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

In theory, the GeForce GTX 1060 should be 2% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 should be quite a bit (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 will be a lot (approximately 144%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 processed per second.

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