GeForce 940M vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which features a clock speed of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is 231% faster than the GeForce 940M in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 36992 (231%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be a lot (approximately 141%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15040 (141%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is superior to the GeForce 940M, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2112 (25%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated 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 per second.

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