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GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 850M uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 876 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which has a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 950 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 40(8x5) SPUs, 4 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 850M will be 5% faster than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M will be much (about 995%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31840 (995%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10816 (338%)

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

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GeForce GTX 850M

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Radeon HD 3470 512MB

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Specifications

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Model	GeForce GTX 850M	Radeon HD 3470 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	March 12 2014	2008
Code Name	GM107	RV620 PRO
Memory	2048 MB	512 MB
Core Speed	876 MHz	800 MHz
Memory Speed	2000 MHz	1900 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	40 watts	(Unknown) watts
Bandwidth	32000 MB/sec	30400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	35040 Mtexels/sec	3200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	14016 Mpixels/sec	3200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	640	40(8x5)
Texture Mapping Units	40	4
Render Output Units	16	4
Bus Type	DDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	128-bit	128-bit
Fab Process	28 nm	55 nm
Transistors	(Unknown) million	(Unknown) million
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 12	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.5	OpenGL 3.0

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the 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 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.

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