GeForce RTX 3090 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which features core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
GeForce RTX 3090		350 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce RTX 3090 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3090		958668 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 805068 (524%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3090 will be quite a bit (about 472%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3090		457560 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 377560 (472%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3090 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3090		156240 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 124240 (388%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.