GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with 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

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 850M should be 21% quicker than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 5504 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be much (about 228%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24352 (228%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (31%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.