In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition are massively better than the AMD FirePro V3900.

The HD 7870 has a 360 MHz higher core clock speed and 56 more Texture Mapping Units than the FirePro V3900. This results in the HD 7870 providing 65.2 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 360 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Render Output Units than the FirePro V3900. This results in the HD 7870 providing 27.1 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 HD 7870 was released less than a year after the FirePro V3900, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The HD 7870 has 1024 MB more video memory than the FirePro V3900, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 7870 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 7870 has 126.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the FirePro V3900, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7870 is massively better than the FirePro V3900.

The Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the FirePro V3900 has 480. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099 and the actual shader performance of the FirePro V3900 is 203. The HD 7870 having 896 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7870 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the FirePro V3900.

The HD 7870 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the FirePro V3900. This means that the HD 7870 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the FirePro V3900.

The FirePro V3900 requires 75 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 7870. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the FirePro V3900, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 7870.