GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

The GeForce GTX 870M makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 941 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1344 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which comes with a clock frequency of 1717 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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 max fill rate.