In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 PCS+ Vortex II Edition are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 140 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the HD 7870. This results in the HD 7870 providing 11.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. 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 140 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7870 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 7870 providing 4.5 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 HD 7870 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 Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition and the Radeon HD 7870 PCS+ Vortex II Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 7870 has 5.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7870 is marginally better than the HD 7870.

Both the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition and the Radeon HD 7870 PCS+ Vortex II Edition have 1280 Shader Processing Units. Having the same number of SPUs and using the same architecture means that the performance they offer can be compared by looking at the memory bandwidth, Texture and Pixel Rates. In this case, the HD 7870 has 11.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate, 4.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate, and 5.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth, so should have a slightly faster performance than the HD 7870.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7870, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 7870.