GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R7 M260X

Intro

The GeForce GTX 870M makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 941 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1344 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260X, which has a clock speed of 825 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.