GeForce GTX 965M vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 825 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is 80% faster than the GeForce GTX 965M in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 965M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 965M is a lot (about 129%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34016 (129%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 965M is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3808 (14%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.