GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 4870 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 980M should in theory perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M is much (approximately 232%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69648 (232%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 54432 (454%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.