In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia Quadro Plex 7000 are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 436 MHz higher core clock speed but 48 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the Quadro Plex 7000. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the HD 7870 manages to provide 7.3 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 436 MHz higher core clock speed than the Quadro Plex 7000, but the Quadro Plex 7000 has 64 more Render Output Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the Quadro Plex 7000 exhibits a 22.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 7870. 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 Quadro Plex 7000, 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 Quadro Plex 7000 has 10240 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 Quadro Plex 7000 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Quadro Plex 7000 has 133.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro Plex 7000 is massively better than the HD 7870.

The Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro Plex 7000 has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro Plex 7000 is 1176. The Quadro Plex 7000 having 77 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Quadro Plex 7000 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7870.

The HD 7870 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Quadro Plex 7000. This means that the HD 7870 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Quadro Plex 7000.

The Quadro Plex 7000 requires 600 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 7870. We would recommend a PSU with at least 900 Watts for the Quadro Plex 7000, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 7870.