Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M230, which features clock speeds of 780 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 1GB should be much faster than the Radeon R5 M230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (350%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 is quite a bit (more or less 26%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (26%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 1GB is a lot (about 297%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R5 M230, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9280 (297%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.