GeForce 920M 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 frequency of 900 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should be 300% quicker than the GeForce 920M in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce 920M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 43200 (300%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 920M is a lot (more or less 146%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 920M		30528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18128 (146%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 920M		7632 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4768 (62%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.