Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M230, which has core clock speeds of 780 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 512MB should be much faster than the Radeon R5 M230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (620%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 512MB will be quite a bit (approximately 92%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (92%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 512MB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8880 (285%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount 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 speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount 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 worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.