GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2, in theory, should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 870M in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9984 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M is quite a bit (about 393%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84016 (393%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M will be a bit (approximately 6%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3850 X2, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1208 (6%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could 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 ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.