GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 51 Watts (51%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M is much (more or less 91%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47448 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43232 (186%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 processed per second. This number 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.