GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with a clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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

GeForce GTX 860M		4340 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 870 (25%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 205 Watts (456%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 860M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (175%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be just a bit (more or less 10%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 860M. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7968 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (about 121%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 860M, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15408 (121%)

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.