GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which features a clock speed of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 965M		60 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 965M will be 21% faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M will be quite a bit (about 465%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49728 (465%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M is quite a bit (more or less 183%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19520 (183%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.