GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R5 M230, which features a core clock frequency of 780 MHz and a DDR3 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 64-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 is quite a bit (about 231%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10888 (231%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M230 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 764 (32%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can 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 ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.