GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M380, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M is much (approximately 163%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65392 (163%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6584 (41%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.