GeForce 940M vs Radeon HD 3870 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, which comes with core speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 940M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (350%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be quite a bit (more or less 107%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13328 (107%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB should be much (about 45%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 940M, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.