GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which features a core clock speed of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 828 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 860M, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M is a lot (more or less 616%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65824 (616%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 860M is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2064 (19%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.