GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features GPU clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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
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

The Radeon HD 7870 XT, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 480 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a lot (approximately 111%) faster with regards to 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 (about 14%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and able to handle higher 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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.