GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which features GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 870M is 33% quicker than the Radeon R9 M270X overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M should be a lot (about 263%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 76392 (263%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10984 (95%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.