Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R5 M230, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 780 MHz. The DDR3 memory works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 320 SPUs along with 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 3470 512MB should perform much faster than the Radeon R5 M230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (90%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 will be quite a bit (approximately 388%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12400 (388%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3470 512MB is a small bit (about 3%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R5 M230, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80 (3%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.