In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 XFX Core Edition.

The R9 270X and the HD 7870 have the same core clock speed of 1000 MHz, but the R9 270X has 80 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the R9 270X exhibits a 80 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 R9 270X and the HD 7870 have the same core clock speed of 1000 MHz, but the R9 270X has 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the R9 270X exhibits a 32 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 R9 270X was released over a year more recently than the HD 7870, and so the R9 270X is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 7870.

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 R9 270X has 2048 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 R9 270X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 270X has 204.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is massively better than the HD 7870.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 XFX Core Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1088. The R9 270X having 1197 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 270X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7870.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire requires 360 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7870 XFX Core Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7870. The R9 270X has been recommended a PSU with 250 Watts more than the HD 7870. The difference is significant enough that the R9 270X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 7870.