Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 XT		6390 points
Radeon R9 270		5943 points
	Difference: 447 (8%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870 XT		15 Mh/s
Radeon R9 270		15 Mh/s
	Difference: 0 (0%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should in theory perform a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 270 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be quite a bit (more or less 23%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (23%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (3%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.