GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 965M		60 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (152%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 100% quicker than the GeForce GTX 965M overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M should be just a bit (approximately 16%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8216 (16%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M should be a lot (about 30%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7008 (30%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range 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 texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 also depends on quite a few 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.