GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with core clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 980M should be 383% faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 101504 (383%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be quite a bit (approximately 832%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 88960 (832%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be much (approximately 522%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 55744 (522%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 ROPs 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.