GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 254 Watts (635%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 700% faster than the GeForce GTX 850M in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 562%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 196960 (562%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (more or less 562%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 850M, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 78784 (562%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.