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 GeForce 8800 GS.

The HD 7870 has a 460 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce 8800 GS. This results in the HD 7870 providing 54.4 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 460 MHz higher core clock speed and 20 more Render Output Units than the GeForce 8800 GS. This results in the HD 7870 providing 25.7 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 over three years more recently than the GeForce 8800 GS, and so the HD 7870 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GeForce 8800 GS when running the latest games.

The HD 7870 has 1664 MB more video memory than the GeForce 8800 GS, 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 116.5 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce 8800 GS, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7870 is massively better than the GeForce 8800 GS.

The Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8800 GS has 96. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 8800 GS is 132. The HD 7870 having 967 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 GeForce 8800 GS.

The HD 7870 transistor size technology is 37 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce 8800 GS. This means that the HD 7870 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce 8800 GS.

The GeForce 8800 GS requires 105 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 7870. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GeForce 8800 GS, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 7870.