GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GTX 870M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M will be a little bit (approximately 18%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15792 (18%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is a small bit (approximately 13%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 870M, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3016 (13%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.