GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which features GPU core speed of 668 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 970M should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is a lot (approximately 592%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63232 (592%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 33664 (315%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.