GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which makes use of 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 card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 880M should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 75008 (142%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be quite a bit (approximately 1043%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 111424 (1043%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19840 (186%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

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