GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1120 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 980M		9476 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 6606 (230%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 51 Watts (51%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6870 should be 5% quicker than the GeForce GTX 980M overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be quite a bit (approximately 98%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49248 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37632 (131%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.