GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which has clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 860M should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M is quite a bit (about 616%) better at 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

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 860M is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.