GeForce 930M vs Radeon HD 3870 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, which has a core clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce 930M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 930M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (400%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 930M should be a lot (approximately 80%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

GeForce 930M		22272 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9872 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB should be quite a bit (about 67%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 930M, and able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 930M		7424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4976 (67%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 are applied 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.