GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, which has core clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1126 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory. 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

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce 830M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 129728 (901%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should be much (about 60%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 830M. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9936 (60%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18168 (221%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.