GeForce 940M vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should be 260% quicker than the GeForce 940M in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (260%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M is quite a bit (about 107%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13328 (107%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3824 (45%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.