GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 830M		25 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 160 Watts (640%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should be 1233% faster than the GeForce 830M overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 177600 (1233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be quite a bit (about 439%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 830M. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72336 (439%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is superior to the GeForce 830M, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21368 (260%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at 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 chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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.