GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R5 M230 should be 25% quicker than the GeForce 8500 GT in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 should be much (about 333%) better at AF than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (333%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M230 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1320 (73%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.