GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which features a GPU core clock speed of 668 MHz, and 256 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 828 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 850M should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 5504 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be much (about 228%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24352 (228%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M will be much (approximately 31%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 applied per second. This is calculated 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.