GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 295 Watts (536%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 950M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 198400 (620%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is much (about 64%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 950M. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23440 (64%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is superior to the GeForce GTX 950M, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9376 (64%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.