GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 should be quite a bit (about 231%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10888 (231%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M230 is superior to the GeForce GT 310, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 764 (32%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.