GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M395X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M395X should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 870M overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M should be a little bit (more or less 14%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M395X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12848 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X will be a small bit (more or less 2%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 870M, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 552 (2%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.