In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 240 2GB are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 230 v2.

The R7 240 has a 230 MHz higher core clock speed than the GT 230, but the GT 230 has 28 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 240. As a result, the GT 230 exhibits a 9.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 240. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 240 has a 230 MHz higher core clock speed than the GT 230, but the GT 230 has 4 more Render Output Units than the R7 240. As a result, the GT 230 exhibits a 0.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 240. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 240 was released over three years more recently than the GT 230, and so the R7 240 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GT 230 when running the latest games.

The R7 240 has 512 MB more video memory than the GT 230, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R7 240 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R7 240 has 4.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 230, which means that the memory performance of the R7 240 is marginally better than the GT 230.

The GeForce GT 230 v2 has 96 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R7 240 2GB has 320. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 230 is 120 and the actual shader performance of the R7 240 is 212. The R7 240 having 92 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R7 240 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GT 230.

The R7 240 transistor size technology is 27 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GT 230. This means that the R7 240 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GT 230.

The GeForce GT 230 v2 requires 75 Watts to run and the Radeon R7 240 2GB requires 30 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GT 230 and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the R7 240. The GT 230 requires 45 Watts more than the R7 240 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GT 230 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 240.