In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 470 XFX RS Black Edition 4GB are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 84 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 470, but the RX 470 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the RX 470 exhibits a 8.1 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 84 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 470, but the RX 470 has 16 more Render Output Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the RX 470 exhibits a 12.1 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 RX 470 was released over three years more recently than the HD 7870, and so the RX 470 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.

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 RX 470 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 RX 470 also has superior memory performance overall.

The RX 470 has 69.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the RX 470 is much better than the HD 7870.

The Radeon RX 470 XFX RS Black Edition 4GB has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 470 is 2572 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099. The RX 470 having 1473 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 470 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7870.

The RX 470 transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 7870. This means that the RX 470 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 7870.

The Radeon RX 470 XFX RS Black Edition 4GB requires 120 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 450 Watts for the RX 470.