GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with core clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 870M should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 69504 (262%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M should be much (more or less 886%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 94704 (886%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11896 (111%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.