GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 830M		25 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 325 Watts (1300%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 830M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 216000 (1500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be quite a bit (about 264%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 830M. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43536 (264%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15768 (192%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 the video card could 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 ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.