GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which has clock 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

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 is much (more or less 231%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 will be a lot (about 32%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 310, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. 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 bandwidth is, the better 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 applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.