GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which comes with a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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 XT		6390 points
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 2740 (75%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 480 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
	Difference: 14592 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be quite a bit (approximately 111%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46800 (111%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be a bit (more or less 14%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (14%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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