GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which comes with a core clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 61 Watts (136%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 860M is 11% faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be quite a bit (about 517%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64112 (517%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 860M is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 352 (3%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per 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 - sometimes also referred to as 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.