GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which has GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 860M should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be quite a bit (more or less 616%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65824 (616%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M is a little bit (about 19%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2064 (19%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.