GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M is a lot (approximately 134%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69912 (134%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be quite a bit (more or less 32%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7328 (32%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.