In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 8830M are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 445M v2.

The Radeon HD 8830M has a 5 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GT 445M. This results in the Radeon HD 8830M providing 0.1 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 8830M has a 5 MHz higher core clock speed than the GT 445M, but the GT 445M has 8 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 8830M. As a result, the GT 445M exhibits a 4.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 8830M. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon HD 8830M was released over a year more recently than the GT 445M, and so the Radeon HD 8830M is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GT 445M.

The Radeon HD 8830M has 1024 MB more video memory than the GT 445M, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The GT 445M has 8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 8830M, which means that the memory performance of the GT 445M is marginally better than the Radeon HD 8830M.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 has 144 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 8830M has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 445M is 164 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8830M is 400. The Radeon HD 8830M having 236 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GT 445M performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 8830M transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GT 445M. This means that the Radeon HD 8830M is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GT 445M. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 8830M should consume less power than the GT 445M.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 requires 35 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 8830M requires 35 Watts. The two GPUs require the same amount of wattage to run. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.