GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (344%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 860M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 176000 (275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is a little bit (approximately 17%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 860M. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13088 (17%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be quite a bit (approximately 101%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 860M, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12848 (101%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.