In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870M are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 445M v2.

The Radeon HD 7870M has a 230 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 445M. This results in the Radeon HD 7870M providing 18.3 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 7870M has a 230 MHz higher core clock speed than the GT 445M and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 7870M providing 3.7 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 7870M was released over a year more recently than the GT 445M, and so the Radeon HD 7870M is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GT 445M.

The Radeon HD 7870M has 1024 MB more video memory than the GT 445M, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon HD 7870M also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon HD 7870M has 24 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 445M, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 7870M is slightly better than the GT 445M.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 has 144 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870M has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 445M is 164 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7870M is 435. The Radeon HD 7870M having 271 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 7870M delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GT 445M.

The Radeon HD 7870M transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GT 445M. This means that the Radeon HD 7870M is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GT 445M.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 requires 35 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 7870M requires 45 Watts. The Radeon HD 7870M requires 10 Watts more than the GT 445M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon HD 7870M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GT 445M.