Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R5 M230, which has a GPU core clock speed of 780 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be 562% faster than the Radeon R5 M230 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89984 (562%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is much (about 37%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5776 (37%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 is a lot (more or less 585%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R5 M230, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18256 (585%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.