GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator 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

GeForce GTX 870M		4770 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 1530 (47%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 870M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M is much (about 50%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34992 (50%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a small bit (approximately 13%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 870M, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3016 (13%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could 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 ROPs by the the core 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.