GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (173%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4870 2GB should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 950M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (260%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M should be quite a bit (about 22%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6560 (22%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M will be quite a bit (approximately 22%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2624 (22%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.