Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1680 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM runs at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 2560 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		235 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		458752 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 305152 (199%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition should be a lot (approximately 236%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		268800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 188800 (236%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition will be a lot (about 236%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7870, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		107520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 75520 (236%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.