GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1150 MHz on this specific card. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

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

GeForce GTX 870M		4770 points
Radeon R7 250		1836 points
	Difference: 2934 (160%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 870M should be a lot faster than the Radeon R7 250 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (30%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M should be a lot (about 339%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81392 (339%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14584 (182%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.