GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 870M should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (81%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M is much (about 886%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 94704 (886%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11896 (111%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 high 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 number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.