GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 970M will be 67% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be much (more or less 496%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 61520 (496%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31952 (258%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.