GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 66 Watts (165%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should be 80% faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be quite a bit (approximately 183%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22640 (183%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1616 (13%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.