GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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 HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 2620 (122%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6790 will be 40% quicker than the GeForce GTX 870M overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (40%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M is a lot (about 214%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71792 (214%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9144 (68%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.