GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which has a clock speed of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 960M should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M should be a lot (more or less 310%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33152 (310%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M is much (more or less 64%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6848 (64%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.