GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which has GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1440(288x5) Stream Processors, 72 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 111 Watts (278%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (300%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be quite a bit (more or less 49%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17160 (49%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9184 (66%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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 reach the maximum fill rate.