Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R5 M230, which features core clock speeds of 780 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R5 M230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 240000 (1500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (about 1387%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 216400 (1387%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon R5 M230, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 89680 (2874%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 in one second. This is calculated 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of 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.