GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with core clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 970M		7520 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 2320 (45%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 970M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be quite a bit (approximately 34%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18880 (34%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be a lot (about 61%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7850, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16832 (61%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.