GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. 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 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 960M should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M is quite a bit (about 310%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33152 (310%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6848 (64%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.