GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which has core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 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

In theory, the GeForce GTX 480 should perform just a bit faster 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 (more or less 90%) faster with regards to 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

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is a better choice, though only just barely. (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 MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.