GeForce 940M vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 940M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 240000 (1500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (approximately 802%) better at AF than the GeForce 940M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 206272 (802%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 84224 (982%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.