GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M230, which comes with core speeds of 780 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 295 should perform much faster than the Radeon R5 M230 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 207776 (1299%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be much (about 491%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 76560 (491%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be a lot (more or less 934%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R5 M230, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29136 (934%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.