GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which features a clock frequency of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 828 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 970M should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be much (about 592%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63232 (592%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 33664 (315%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.