GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (173%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 2GB should be 260% quicker than the GeForce GTX 950M overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (260%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M should be quite a bit (more or less 22%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6560 (22%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950M is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2624 (22%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, 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 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 in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.