GeForce GT 430 1GB vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		60 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 will be 733% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 1GB overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (733%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be a lot (approximately 700%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78400 (700%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is superior to the GeForce GT 430 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22800 (814%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.