GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 830M		25 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3690/3830 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 830M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 12096 (84%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 830M should be much (approximately 54%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5776 (54%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is superior to the GeForce 830M, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2456 (30%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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.