GeForce GTX 870M vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R5 M230, which has 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 870M		4770 points
Radeon R5 M230		1281 points
	Difference: 3489 (272%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 870M should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon R5 M230 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (500%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M will be much (about 576%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R5 M230. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 89792 (576%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is superior to the Radeon R5 M230, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19464 (624%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.