GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which has a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 TAUs, 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 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 143 Watts (318%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 860M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (140%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be just a bit (approximately 13%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8512 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14448 (113%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.