GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 828 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 256MB should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 950M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 256MB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 20992 (66%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M should be much (more or less 242%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25872 (242%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M should be a lot (approximately 37%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 256MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (37%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.