GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features a core clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 86 Watts (132%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5850 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 960M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a little bit (more or less 19%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8360 (19%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a lot (about 32%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 960M, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5664 (32%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can 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 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.