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 HD 7730 v2 PowerColor 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 210 MHz higher core clock speed and 56 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7730. This results in the HD 7870 providing 61.6 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 210 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Render Output Units than the HD 7730. This results in the HD 7870 providing 25.9 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 7730 was released over a year more recently than the HD 7870, and so the HD 7730 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 Radeon HD 7730 v2 PowerColor 2GB Edition 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 HD 7870 has 129.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7730, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7870 is massively better than the HD 7730.

The Radeon HD 7730 v2 PowerColor 2GB Edition has 384 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7730 is 261 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099. The HD 7870 having 838 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 HD 7730.

The Radeon HD 7730 v2 PowerColor 2GB Edition requires 47 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 HD 7730.