GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 480		3650 points
	Difference: 2580 (71%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 480 should in theory be a bit better than the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 23808 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be much (approximately 90%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38000 (90%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is a bit (approximately 5%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7870, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (5%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.