In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 EVGA SC Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 69 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 780, but the GTX 780 has 112 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the GTX 780 exhibits a 99.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 7870. 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 69 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 780, but the GTX 780 has 16 more Render Output Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the GTX 780 exhibits a 12.9 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 GTX 780 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 GTX 780 has 1024 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 GTX 780 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 780 has 133.5 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 780 is massively better than the HD 7870.

The GeForce GTX 780 EVGA SC Edition has 2304 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 780 is 2288 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099. The GTX 780 having 1189 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 780 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7870.

The GeForce GTX 780 EVGA SC Edition requires 250 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 780.