GeForce 940M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. 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

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 940M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 10496 (66%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be quite a bit (more or less 141%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15040 (141%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is superior to the GeForce 940M, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.