GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1100 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M385X should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 860M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be a lot (about 24%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M385X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14912 (24%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is much (approximately 38%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 860M, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4848 (38%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.