In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition are massively better than the Intel HD i5 6400T.

The HD 7870 has a 660 MHz higher core clock speed and 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD i5 6400T. This results in the HD 7870 providing 75.2 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 660 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Render Output Units than the HD i5 6400T. This results in the HD 7870 providing 29.5 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 HD i5 6400T was released over three years more recently than the HD 7870, and so the HD i5 6400T is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 7870 when running the latest games.

The HD 7870 has 2048 MB video memory, but the HD i5 6400T does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

The HD i5 6400T has 24 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the HD i5 6400T is 182 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099. The HD 7870 having 917 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 i5 6400T.

The HD i5 6400T transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 7870. This means that the HD i5 6400T is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 7870.

The HD i5 6400T 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 300 Watts for the HD i5 6400T.