GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7990, which has GPU core speed of 950 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 310 Watts (477%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GT 230 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 537600 (1400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be quite a bit (approximately 2664%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 234400 (2664%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the GeForce GT 230, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56400 (1282%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount 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 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 could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.