Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R5 M230 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128128 (801%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB will be quite a bit (about 69%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (69%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should be a lot (more or less 746%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R5 M230, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23280 (746%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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