GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 830M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 91584 (636%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a lot (approximately 30%) better at AF than the GeForce 830M. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4912 (30%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13144 (160%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per 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 amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.