GeForce 930M vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which features core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 256MB should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 930M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce 930M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 38592 (268%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 930M should be a lot (about 108%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 930M		22272 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11584 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 256MB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 930M		7424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3264 (44%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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.