GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 950 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 40(8x5) Stream Processors, 4 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 850M should in theory be a bit better than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M is much (approximately 995%) better at anisotropic filtering 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

The GeForce GTX 850M should be a lot (about 338%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.