GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be 66% quicker than the GeForce GTX 965M in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41984 (66%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M will be quite a bit (about 183%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39040 (183%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 965M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8832 (41%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 the video card could 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 the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.