GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which has a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1120 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 980M		9476 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 6606 (230%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 51 Watts (51%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6870 should in theory be a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M is quite a bit (more or less 98%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49248 (98%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be quite a bit (approximately 131%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6870, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37632 (131%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.