GeForce GT 230 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 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 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 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (208%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB is 525% quicker than the GeForce GT 230 in general, due to its greater data rate. (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 (more or less 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 is quite a bit (about 482%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 230, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.