GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which has a clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 980M should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be much (about 704%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87248 (704%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 54032 (436%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.