GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1400 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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

Radeon R9 270		5943 points
GeForce GTX 870M		4770 points
	Difference: 1173 (25%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 870M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (87%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M will be quite a bit (approximately 46%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33392 (46%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is quite a bit (approximately 28%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 870M, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6216 (28%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.