GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with a clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 7081 (296%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 27 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M is quite a bit (more or less 168%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62448 (168%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be a lot (more or less 168%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6850, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 41632 (168%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of 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.