GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 315 Watts (525%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 will be 1900% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 547200 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is much (approximately 2071%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 232000 (2071%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 58000 (2071%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.