GeForce 820M vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 279 Watts (1860%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 820M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce 820M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 240000 (1500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 1917%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 820M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 220496 (1917%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 3127%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 820M, and able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 89924 (3127%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on 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 get to the max fill rate.