GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		3466 points
	Difference: 2764 (80%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 should be a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
	Difference: 25344 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is much (more or less 52%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27392 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (more or less 22%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5696 (22%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.