GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 will be much (approximately 231%) better 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 superior to the GeForce GT 310, by a large margin. (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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.