GeForce RTX 3050 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which has core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3050		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce RTX 3050 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 75776 (49%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3050 is quite a bit (more or less 55%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44160 (55%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3050 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		49664 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17664 (55%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.