GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (208%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 201600 (525%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be quite a bit (approximately 918%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80800 (918%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be much (about 482%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GT 230, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (482%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.