GeForce 830M vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1400 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 830M		25 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (500%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce 830M in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 164800 (1144%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be a lot (approximately 337%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 830M. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55536 (337%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20568 (250%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.