GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which comes with a clock frequency of 825 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should perform much faster than the GeForce 830M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 100800 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB will be a lot (approximately 60%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 830M. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9936 (60%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be a lot (approximately 221%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 830M, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18168 (221%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.