GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

The GeForce GTX 860M makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 797 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1152 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which features a clock speed of 780 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 320 SPUs, 20 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.