In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition are massively better than the Nvidia Quadro FX 4800.

The HD 7870 was released less than a year after the Quadro FX 4800, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The HD 7870 has 512 MB more video memory than the Quadro FX 4800, 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 78.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Quadro FX 4800, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7870 is much better than the Quadro FX 4800.

The Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro FX 4800 has 192. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro FX 4800 is 116. The HD 7870 having 983 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 Quadro FX 4800.

The HD 7870 transistor size technology is 37 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Quadro FX 4800. This means that the HD 7870 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Quadro FX 4800.

The Quadro FX 4800 requires 150 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 7870. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the Quadro FX 4800, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 7870.