GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, which features a core clock speed of 825 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 1126 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 965M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80128 (125%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M should be much (more or less 129%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34016 (129%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 965M is superior to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, but only just. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3808 (14%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.