GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which has core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 TAUs 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 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (37%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5850 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 870M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M is quite a bit (about 102%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53192 (102%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 616 (3%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.