GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 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 should in theory be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9984 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be a lot (approximately 246%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52544 (246%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is superior to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22976 (107%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.