GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon R7 250X 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1125 MHz on this particular card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		95 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (111%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 250X 2GB should be 13% faster than the GeForce GTX 860M in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		72000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be a lot (about 91%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36512 (91%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X 2GB is much (about 25%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 860M, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3248 (25%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.