GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 850M is 21% faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 5504 (21%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be quite a bit (more or less 228%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24352 (228%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M will be much (about 31%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3690/3830, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (31%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels 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 colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.