Radeon R5 M230 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which has a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M280X should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon R5 M230 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 72000 (450%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X is quite a bit (about 223%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34800 (223%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M280X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11280 (362%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one 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 called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.