GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (317%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 235200 (817%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (more or less 957%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107200 (957%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26800 (957%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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 get to the maximum fill rate.