GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 960M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41984 (66%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M will be quite a bit (more or less 105%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22464 (105%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be a lot (about 22%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 960M, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3840 (22%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's 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 also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.