In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition are massively better than the AMD Radeon R7 240 MSI Low Profile 4GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 280 MHz higher core clock speed and 60 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 240. This results in the HD 7870 providing 66.2 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 280 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Render Output Units than the R7 240. This results in the HD 7870 providing 26.5 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 R7 240 was released over a year more recently than the HD 7870, and so the R7 240 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 7870.

The R7 240 has 2048 MB more video memory than the HD 7870, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the HD 7870 has superior memory performance.

The HD 7870 has 126.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 240, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7870 is massively better than the R7 240.

The Radeon R7 240 MSI Low Profile 4GB Edition has 320 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 240 is 212 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099. The HD 7870 having 887 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 R7 240.

The Radeon R7 240 MSI Low Profile 4GB Edition requires 35 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 400 Watts for the R7 240.