In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6870M are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 445M v2.

The Radeon HD 6870M has a 105 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 445M. This results in the Radeon HD 6870M providing 13.3 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 6870M has a 105 MHz higher core clock speed than the GT 445M and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 6870M providing 1.7 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon HD 6870M was released less than a year after the GT 445M, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 and the Radeon HD 6870M have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The Radeon HD 6870M has 24 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 445M, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 6870M is slightly better than the GT 445M.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 has 144 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6870M has 800. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 445M is 164 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 6870M is 270. The Radeon HD 6870M having 106 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 6870M delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GT 445M.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 requires 35 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6870M requires 50 Watts. The Radeon HD 6870M requires 15 Watts more than the GT 445M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon HD 6870M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GT 445M.