GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Radeon HD 7870		6230 points
GeForce GTX 850M		3340 points
	Difference: 2890 (87%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7870		172 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 850M		49 Sol/s
	Difference: 123 (251%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (338%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7870 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (380%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (more or less 128%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44960 (128%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17984 (128%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.