In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 Sapphire GHz OC Edition CrossFire are noticeably better than the AMD FirePro S9150.

The HD 7870 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed but 16 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the FirePro S9150. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the HD 7870 manages to provide 9.6 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 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the FirePro S9150 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 7870 providing 9.6 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 FirePro S9150 was released over a year more recently than the HD 7870, and so the FirePro S9150 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 FirePro S9150 has 12288 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 FirePro S9150 also has superior memory performance overall.

The memory bandwidth of the FirePro S9150 and the Radeon HD 7870 Sapphire GHz OC Edition CrossFire are the same, which means the FirePro S9150 and the HD 7870 have equal limitations when it comes to graphical data transfer.

The FirePro S9150 has 2816 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 Sapphire GHz OC Edition CrossFire has 2560. However, the actual shader performance of the FirePro S9150 is 2534 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 2285. The FirePro S9150 having 249 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 7870 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The FirePro S9150 requires 235 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7870 Sapphire GHz OC Edition CrossFire. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7870, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the FirePro S9150.