Radeon R5 M230 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 M260, which has clock speeds of 715 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R5 M230		1281 points
Radeon R7 M260		1120 points
	Difference: 161 (14%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 should be a little bit (more or less 10%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1560 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 is a lot (about 83%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R5 M230, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2600 (83%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.