GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition

GeForce GTX 960
Memory: 2048Mb GDDR5DESKTOP
Release date: 22 Jan 2015
GeForce GTX 960
Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
Memory: 2048Mb GDDR5DESKTOP
Release date: 5 Mar 2012
Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition

Summary

Synthetic performance index

  • GeForce GTX 960
    125%
  • Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
    100%

Relative performance

Reasons to consider GeForce GTX 960

55 watts lower power draw. This might be a strong point if your current power supply is not enough to handle the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition .
This is a much newer product, it might have better long term support.
Around 25% higher average synthetic performance.
Supports PhysX
Supports G-Sync
Supports ShadowPlay (allows game streaming/recording with minimum performance penalty)
Based on an outdated architecture (Nvidia Maxwell), there may be no performance optimizations for current games and applications

Reasons to consider Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition

Supports Direct3D 12 Async Compute
Supports ReLive (allows game streaming/recording with minimum performance penalty)
Supports Mantle
Based on an outdated architecture (AMD GCN), there may be no performance optimizations for current games and applications

GeForce GTX 960

HWBench recommends GeForce GTX 960

The GeForce GTX 960 is the better performing card based on the synthetic benchmarks used (1 benchmarks).


Specifications

Core Configuration

GeForce GTX 960Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
GPU NameGM206 (GM206-300-A1)vsPitcairn (Pitcairn XT)
Fab Process28 nmvs28 nm
Die Size228 mm²vs212 mm²
Transistors2,940 millionvs2,800 million
Shaders1024vs1280
Compute Units8vs20
Core clock1127 MHzvs1000 MHz
ROPs32vs32
TMUs64vs80

Memory Configuration

GeForce GTX 960Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
Memory TypeGDDR5vsGDDR5
Bus Width128 bitvs256 bit
Memory Speed1753 MHz
7012 MHz effective
vs1200 MHz
4800 MHz effective
Memory Size2048 Mbvs2048 Mb

Additional details

GeForce GTX 960Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
TDP120 wattsvs175 watts
Release Date22 Jan 2015vs5 Mar 2012

Raw Performance comparison

Pixel Rate

  • GeForce GTX 960
    36.10 GP/s
  • Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
    32.00 GP/s

GigaPixels - higher is better

Texel Rate

  • GeForce GTX 960
    72.10 GT/s
  • Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
    80.00 GT/s

GigaTexels - higher is better

Memory bandwidth

  • GeForce GTX 960
    112.20 GB/s
  • Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
    154.00 GB/s

GB/s - higher is better

Single precision performance

  • GeForce GTX 960
    2308.10 GFLOPs
  • Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
    2560.00 GFLOPs

GFLOPs - higher is better

Synthetic benchmarks

3DMark 11

  • GeForce GTX 960
    10380
  • Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
    8290

Points (higher is better)