GeForce GTX 1050 vs GeForce GTX 870M

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1050 has a GPU clock speed of 1354 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 640 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 870M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 941 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1344 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 24 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.