GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R5 M230 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8500 GT in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 should be a lot (approximately 333%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 will be much (about 73%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8500 GT, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.