GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which comes with a clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1125 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M270X should in theory be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 860M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be much (approximately 164%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47512 (164%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be a little bit (more or less 10%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 M270X, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1152 (10%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.