Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 780 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. 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 3850 X2 will be 562% faster than the Radeon R5 M230 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89984 (562%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a lot (more or less 37%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5776 (37%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is superior to the Radeon R5 M230, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18256 (585%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.