In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 SLI are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 200 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 560, but the GTX 560 has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the GTX 560 exhibits a 9.9 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 200 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 560, but the GTX 560 has 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the GTX 560 exhibits a 19.5 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 over a year more recently than the GTX 560, and so the HD 7870 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 560.

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 GeForce GTX 560 SLI and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 560 has 101.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 560 is massively better than the HD 7870.

The GeForce GTX 560 SLI has 672 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 is 1089 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099. The HD 7870 having 10 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GTX 560 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD 7870 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 560. This means that the HD 7870 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 560. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the HD 7870 should consume less power than the GTX 560.

The GeForce GTX 560 SLI requires 300 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 560.