GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this particular card. 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

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 950M will be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 5504 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M is a lot (about 242%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25872 (242%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950M is superior to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (37%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 reach the maximum fill rate.