GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7770, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7770 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 33600 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be quite a bit (more or less 355%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (355%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be quite a bit (approximately 264%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 230, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (264%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.