GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which has a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, 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 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 96 Watts (175%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 will be 300% quicker than the GeForce GTX 950M overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (300%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be quite a bit (approximately 43%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 950M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15640 (43%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8576 (59%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.