Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which comes with a core clock frequency of 780 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon R5 M230 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 214400 (1340%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be quite a bit (more or less 285%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44400 (285%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20880 (669%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.