GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a frequency of 900 MHz on this card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 965M		60 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 46 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 965M should be 11% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M should be quite a bit (about 387%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48016 (387%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing 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 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17808 (144%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.