GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which features core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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

Radeon R9 270		5943 points
GeForce GTX 860M		4340 points
	Difference: 1603 (37%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 860M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (180%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be a small bit (about 6%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4512 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16048 (126%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.