In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD FirePro W9000 are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 35 MHz higher core clock speed than the FirePro W9000, but the FirePro W9000 has 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the FirePro W9000 exhibits a 44 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 7870. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7870 has a 35 MHz higher core clock speed than the FirePro W9000 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 7870 providing 1.1 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The FirePro W9000 was released less than a year after the HD 7870, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The FirePro W9000 has 4096 MB more video memory than the HD 7870, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the FirePro W9000 also has superior memory performance overall.

The FirePro W9000 has 109.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the FirePro W9000 is massively better than the HD 7870.

The Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the FirePro W9000 has 2048. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099 and the actual shader performance of the FirePro W9000 is 1298. The FirePro W9000 having 199 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the FirePro W9000 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7870.

The FirePro W9000 requires 274 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 7870. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the FirePro W9000, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 7870.