GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare all that 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 as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GTX should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R5 M230 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 54400 (340%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX will be much (about 177%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27600 (177%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX is a lot (approximately 246%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R5 M230, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7680 (246%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.