GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 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 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (733%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be quite a bit (about 700%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78400 (700%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 3GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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 processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.