GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3850 1GB should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 20992 (66%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M is much (approximately 228%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24352 (228%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M will be quite a bit (approximately 31%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (31%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per 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 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.