GeForce GT 430 1GB vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 is 733% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 1GB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a lot (approximately 700%) more effective at texture 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 screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is the winner, 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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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