GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R5 M230, which features core speeds of 780 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB will be 140% faster than the Radeon R5 M230 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (140%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB should be a lot (about 69%) better at AF than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3480 (112%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.