GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which comes with core speeds of 780 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

GeForce GTX 850M		3340 points
Radeon R5 M230		1281 points
	Difference: 2059 (161%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 850M should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R5 M230 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M will be a lot (approximately 125%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19440 (125%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10896 (349%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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