GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 133 Watts (242%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5870 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 950M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (380%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (about 86%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 950M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31440 (86%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be quite a bit (more or less 86%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 950M, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12576 (86%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.