GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (483%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 1030 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 104448 (213%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be much (more or less 98%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 1030. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39520 (98%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be much (more or less 58%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GT 1030, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11760 (58%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 Render Output Units by the the core 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.