GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M295X, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon R9 M295X		125 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M295X should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 870M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (83%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M should be a small bit (more or less 10%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M295X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9392 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X is a bit (about 6%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 870M, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1416 (6%)

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.