GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 588% faster than the GeForce GT 230 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 225600 (588%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 1245%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109600 (1245%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (approximately 573%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GT 230, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25200 (573%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.