GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

The GeForce GTX 850M makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 876 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which has a core clock frequency of 1717 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.