GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 58 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 880M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M is a lot (about 80%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54112 (80%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is superior to the Radeon HD 5870, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (12%)

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 transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.