GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 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

The Radeon HD 7970, in theory, should be quite a bit 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 much (more or less 238%) faster with regards to AF 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 much (about 111%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 850M, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.