GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R5 M230 in general. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (260%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GT 512MB will be quite a bit (more or less 33%) better at AF than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5200 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB is superior to the Radeon R5 M230, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7280 (233%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is 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 DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip 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 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.