Nvidia Titan X vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which features a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Nvidia Titan X		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Nvidia Titan X will be 220% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		491520 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 337920 (220%)

Texel Rate

The Nvidia Titan X is quite a bit (about 297%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		317408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 237408 (297%)

Pixel Rate

The Nvidia Titan X should be much (about 325%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Nvidia Titan X		136032 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 104032 (325%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied 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 graphics 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 maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.