GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a core clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 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

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 850M		3340 points
	Difference: 4885 (146%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 210 Watts (525%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 232000 (725%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (about 238%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83360 (238%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 111%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 850M, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15584 (111%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.