GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 88 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 is 20% faster than the GeForce GTX 980M in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be much (approximately 47%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31648 (47%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is superior to the Radeon HD 5870, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39232 (144%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.