GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which has a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M280X should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 230 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 49600 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X should be a lot (about 473%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41600 (473%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M280X is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (227%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.