GeForce 920M vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which features a clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 920M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce 920M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 43200 (300%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 920M will be quite a bit (more or less 146%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 920M		30528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18128 (146%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB should be much (approximately 62%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 920M, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 920M		7632 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4768 (62%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.