GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs 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

GeForce GTX 980M		9476 points
Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
	Difference: 3246 (52%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 980M		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 17 (11%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (75%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7870 should be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be much (more or less 25%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19648 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is superior to the Radeon HD 7870, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 34432 (108%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.