Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which has clock 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 2GB should perform much faster than the Radeon R5 M230 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (620%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB should be much (approximately 92%) better at AF than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (92%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 2GB is much (about 285%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R5 M230, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8880 (285%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.