GeForce GT 430 1GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		60 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (117%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GT 430 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (433%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be a lot (approximately 391%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 430 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43840 (391%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24720 (883%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.