GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with core clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator 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

GeForce GTX 850M		3340 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 1190 (55%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (275%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 850M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (320%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M will be a small bit (approximately 4%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1440 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 576 (4%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels the video card can 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 Render Output Units 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 output 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 potential to reach the maximum fill rate.