GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which has core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 850M		3340 points
	Difference: 4885 (146%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 210 Watts (525%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 725% quicker than the GeForce GTX 850M overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 232000 (725%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (about 238%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83360 (238%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (approximately 111%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 850M, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15584 (111%)

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 transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.