GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which features core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 950M should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 5504 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M is a lot (about 242%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25872 (242%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M should be quite a bit (more or less 37%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.